Toronto journalist Christopher Shulgan’s The Soviet Ambassador is a compelling and detailed account of the life and ideological development of Alexander Yakovlev, the man thought to be a key figure in shaping Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Yakovlev, a Communist stalwart for much of his life, was effectively exiled from the Soviet Union and given the posting of ambassador to Canada after he published an article critical of the regime in a Soviet journal in the early 1970s.

Shulgan makes the argument that it was here in Canada, where the top members of the Politburo thought Yakovlev could do no harm, that the ambassador ultimately decided that the Soviet Union was in desperate need of economic and political reform. The book’s climax comes when Yakovlev convinces Gorbachev, then just a fast-rising star in the Communist Party, to visit Canada for a tour of some farms, most of them in southwestern Ontario.

While Yakovlev’s Canadian period undoubtedly served as a crucial factor in the shift in his politics, Shulgan tries to sift through the rest of Yakovlev’s life and the autobiographies that he subsequently wrote to determine if there were other moments or events that pointed him in that direction. Shulgan seems to want all of them to be a part of that momentum, but he has trouble making sense of Yakovlev’s occasional appearances in some of the Soviet Union’s most notable outbursts of unpleasantness, including, for example, his role as the chief propagandist for the USSR during the Prague Spring of 1968.

The Soviet Ambassador provides a unique glimpse into the world of the Soviet Union’s political elite and Canadian-Soviet relations during the Trudeau years. But Shulgan often seems overly convinced that his subject’s encounters with the writings of dissidents or experiences in Canada and the West played a more important role in the emergence of glasnost than more practical concerns like the anemic Soviet economy.