Alexander Yakovlev

Alexander Yakovlev may refer to:

Alexander Yakovlev (Russian politician)

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Я́ковлев; 2 December 1923 – 18 October 2005) was a Soviet politician and historian. During the 1980s he was a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The chief of party ideology, the same position as that previously held by Mikhail Suslov, he was called the "godfather of glasnost" as he is considered to be the intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program of glasnost and perestroika.

Yakovlev was the first Soviet politician to acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Nazi Germany in 1989.

Early career

Yakovlev was born to a peasant family in a tiny village (Красные Ткачи) on the Volga near Yaroslavl. He served in the Red Army during World War II, being badly wounded in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1944. Beginning in 1958, he was an exchange student at Columbia University for one year.

Alexander Yakovlev (diplomat)

Alexander Yakovlev was a long-serving tenured member of the United Nations procurement department (since 1985). He was involved in the oil-for-food scandal and had other allegations of impropriety.

The Russian diplomat was accused by the investigators of taking nearly $1 million in bribes, which also includes alleged illicit dealings with Compass Group PLC's subsidiary Eurest Support Services (ESS) and its terminated CEO Peter R. Harris and senior executive Andy Seiwert.

Yakovlev is alleged to have conducted himself improperly in 1996 when he indirectly tried to get bribes from Societe Generale de Surveillance S.A..

Yakovlev resigned June 23, 2005. On August 8, 2005, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan waived the diplomatic immunity of Alexander Yakovlev on a request from the U.S. Attorney's Office, and Yakovlev apparently had been taken into custody, said Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's chief of staff. Yakovlev's case (1:2005-cr-00819) was assigned to New York Southern District.