Alexander N. Yakovlev : RUSSIA’S WOULD-BE KINGMAKER : He exudes no charisma and carries the baggage of seven failed regimes. But few are ready to write off his dream of uniting the forces of reform and democracy.

He has the charisma of cold oatmeal and carries the political baggage of loyal service to seven failed regimes dating back to the dictatorship of Josef Stalin.

But Alexander N. Yakovlev, godfather of glasnost and guru to Presidents Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin, is not quite ready to retreat from Russia’s turbulent political arena.

Having fallen with the political fortunes of Gorbachev and strayed from the fold of Yeltsin, Yakovlev is now taking on the task of defining a political center in hopes of ensuring a democratic victory in December’s parliamentary elections.

At 71, the career chameleon and quintessential political survivor is once again reinventing himself to secure a role in the next phase of doing the same for Russia.

The moon-faced Yakovlev has established the Russian Party for Social Democracy and aims to herd this country’s proliferation of parties and movements into “a two- or three-party system, like they have in civilized countries,” he says.

He has yet to identify his party’s preferred candidates for president or prime minister, and his attempt to unite the scattered forces of reform and democracy faces competition from rival blocs being organized by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, liberal economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky and parliamentary Speaker Ivan P. Rybkin.

And with a name as common in Russia as John Smith is in the United States, Yakovlev also suffers a personal identity crisis. He is hampered further by popular revulsion for all of the established political forces he has belonged to, from the much-detested Communist Party to Gorbachev’s now-despised perestroika movement to Yeltsin’s increasingly reclusive and bureaucratic leadership.

Yet few are ready to write off Yakovlev’s chances for success in his quest to become kingmaker, once he settles on who should be king.

The old pol insists that he has no personal aspirations in the June, 1966, presidential elections, or even for a seat in the Duma, the virtually irrelevant lower house of Parliament, in December’s vote.

But he demurs, with a corroborating “we’ll see,” when asked if he seeks to choreograph the confluence of forces supporting reform.

“Despite the terrible things going on in the country--the war in Chechnya, the fight over Crimea--the situation is actually becoming more stable,” says Yakovlev, explaining why he has re-emerged from semi-retirement. “But this is no credit to the government. People are simply tired.”

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Fatigue has spawned apathy among average Russians, allowing extremists at both ends of the political spectrum to usurp a disproportionate share of power, he says.

The party of ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky won 23% of the vote for Duma seats a year and a half ago and is one of the Duma’s most powerful factions. His strongest competition in the struggling provinces is a revitalized and unabashedly authoritarian Communist Party.

But Yakovlev, who seems intent on recovering his Gorbachev-era role as the gray eminence, the man behind the throne, argues persuasively that the appeal of extremists is on the wane.

“You know who people are voting for? Individuals who have shown themselves to be a success by their own making. Regional figures. Enterprise directors. People unconnected with the established and discredited political parties,” says Yakovlev. “This is a good thing. It shows people respect performance. . . .

“We don’t have a real candidate for leader now. No one can name one. But someone could come from the provinces,” Yakovlev surmises, adding that “Moscow has never yielded a single leader.”

Yakovlev acknowledges that he faces an uphill battle to persuade Russians that their only salvation is to stay on the painful path of reform.

While his long experience in propaganda and ideology may stand him well in out-organizing the younger ringmasters seeking to control the political center, even some of his admirers fear that his age and association with past leaders have rendered him a spent political force.

“Yakovlev retains great prestige among the intelligentsia, and many liberal politicians would welcome his experience and talent in their camp,” says Nikolai K. Svanidze, host of a political affairs program on Russian television. “But no matter how much we may admire Yakovlev, we can’t pin our political hopes on him. He is our history, the elder of elders. He is a father of Russian democracy. But this is where his active political career ends.”

Ironically, sworn enemies of reform fear his return more than do the reform-minded competitors from whom Yakovlev’s party would be siphoning off votes.

Yakovlev brushes off suggestions he has fashioned his political views to follow political trends.

“Can you name one person on top who didn’t come out of the Communist Party?” he asks, claiming that it was those with an inside track with the totalitarian power structure, like himself and Gorbachev, who brought about its eventual demise.

“This regime could be brought down only from inside. The totalitarian, Stalinist regime in Russia had to be exploded from within the totalitarian party,” he insists. “This is our paradox. Yet we managed to achieve it.”

Although he rejects the label of survivor, Yakovlev’s career has traced the tumultuous lurches of history.

Born to a peasant family on Dec. 2, 1923, he fought in World War II and joined the Communist Party when he was released from service after being wounded.

He began work with the party in regional propaganda operations in 1948 and used a year at Columbia University in New York a decade later to research Cold War-flavored studies of American imperialism and “bourgeois literature.”

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During the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Yakovlev was assigned to supervise propaganda.

A modest diversion from the party line in a 1972 political debate landed him in what was then considered shameful exile: He was posted as Soviet ambassador to Canada.

He remained in Ottawa for more than a decade, until Gorbachev visited Canada as party agriculture chief in 1983. Both men claim to have spotted a kindred spirit and to have conspired to inaugurate reforms. When Gorbachev became party general secretary in 1985, Yakovlev resumed his propaganda duties in the service of perestroika .

As ideological navigator to Gorbachev, Yakovlev is widely credited with the most lasting contribution of that reform era: the policy of glasnost that freed state-run media from the party’s censorial shackles and persuaded Russians that they had a right to speak their minds.

Yakovlev left Gorbachev’s side after discovering, during the case against the 1991 coup plotters, that Gorbachev had failed to protect him from the KGB. “I cannot forgive him for allowing them to tap my phone,” Yakovlev says.

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Moving over to Yeltsin’s camp was natural, he says, because “there is little difference in their policies, just in their methods.”

Yakovlev heads Yeltsin’s commission on rehabilitation of political prisoners, and served as director of the Ostankino state broadcasting network until leaving in March to launch his political movement.

While Yakovlev and Yeltsin have distanced themselves in recent months as both maneuver to influence this year’s elections, they have also kept open the option of reconciliation.

But if the political center remains a battleground, Yakovlev--despite his age and association with those now discredited--may serve yet another leader, once he has worked out who that should be.