Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Я́ковлев; 2 December 1923 – 18 October 2005) was a Soviet and Russian politician, diplomat, and historian. A member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s, he was termed the "godfather of glasnost", and was the intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programme of glasnost and perestroika.

Born into a rural family, Yakovlev served as a platoon commander of a marine brigade during World War II, and became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following the war. During the rule of Nikita Khrushchev, he became a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, before resigning to study abroad as part of the Fulbright Programme, returning in 1960. Under Leonid Brezhnev, he became Deputy Head of Agitprop and was placed in charge of a group on creating the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union. He was later demoted to ambassador to Canada, in response to his public opposition to ethnic nationalism within the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, Yakovlev returned to the Soviet Union, and became a prominent supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's proposed reforms. In response to his perceived importance in the reforms, he came under attack from hardliners such as Alexander Lebed and Gennady Zyuganov, eventually resigning two days prior to the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt. During the coup attempt, Yakovlev was a supporter of pro-democratic forces, and later became a supporter of Boris Yeltsin before turning against his successor, Vladimir Putin, in response to democratic backsliding which occurred during Putin's presidency.

The first child of five, Yakovlev was born to a peasant family in a small village called Korolyovo, on the Volga River, near Yaroslavl. He had four sisters, two of whom died in infancy. His father, Nikolai Alekseyevich Yakovlev, only attended school for four years, and his mother, Agafiya Mikhailovna, for three months. Yakovlev was sickly in childhood and suffered from scrofula. His father served in the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War and was a devoted communist; he became the first chairman of a local collective farm. Their house was set ablaze while he was seven, and the family moved to Krasnye Tkachi.

Yakovlev graduated from secondary school days before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He was drafted into the Soviet Navy in November 1941, with brief training, and became part of the Soviet Marine Corps [ru]. He served as a platoon commander of the 6th Marine Brigade of the Baltic Fleet [ru], on the Volkhov Front during the Siege of Leningrad. On 6 August 1942, he was leading 30 Chuvash soldiers and was ordered to charge German positions in Vinyagolovo near Leningrad and was badly wounded. He was hospitalised until February 1943, and was subsequently demobilised. He became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1944. At this time he regarded the Communist Party as "life's truth", and affirmed he was totally loyal and faithful to Soviet Union, and he was an ardent admirer of Joseph Stalin.

In September 1945, he resumed education at the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute [ru] to study history. On September 8, 1945, he married Nina Ivanovna Smirnova. He graduated the same year and went to Moscow to attend the Higher Party School. In November 1946, he was appointed the instructor of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation in Yaroslavl, a post he held for a year and a half. Shortly after this, he had his first doubts about the regime, when he was shocked to see train after train carrying Soviet ex-prisoners-of-war being sent to labour camps. At the Vspolye train station, he saw weeping women and was dismayed at how they were treated. This memory troubled him deeply and never left him.

In March 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, he was assigned to the party's Central Committee as an instructor in the department of schools. On 25 February 1956, Khrushchev's Secret Speech became the most traumatic event in Yakovlev's early Moscow life; he listened to the speech from a balcony in the Grand Kremlin Palace. After the 20th Party Congress, Yakovlev lost his previous enthusiasm for communism and led a double life. He wanted to turn to the original sources on Communism—Marx, Engels, Lenin, German philosophers, French and Italian socialists and British economists. He asked to leave the Central Committee to enroll in the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee. While twice refused, he was finally allowed to study there for two years and became convinced that Marxism-Leninism was hollow, impractical, and inhumane, as well as a prognostic fraud. This healed his internal political conflict following the 20th Party Congress. He began to agree with Khrushchev.

Beginning in 1958, he was chosen as a exchange student at Columbia University in the United States for one year, as part of the Fulbright Programme. Of the seventeen Soviet students, fourteen were selected by the KGB. Yakovlev and three others, including Oleg Kalugin, went to Columbia. All other students besides Yakovlev were members of the KGB. He intensively studied the English language, Roosevelt and the New Deal, drawing connections between the United States at that time and the Soviet Union. At the end, in May 1959, the Soviet visitors were taken on a thirty-day tour of the United States, during which he stayed with families from Vermont, Chicago and Iowa. However, his year in America did little to assuage his anti-Americanism because of the greed, racism, and other things that he witnessed. Yakovlev returned to the Central Committee to work on ideology and propaganda, and published several anti-American books. He defended a dissertation dealing with the historiography of US foreign policy, and received the degree of Candidate of Sciences, the equivalent of a doctorate, in July 1960.