Alexander Yakovlev, one of Russia's most respected statesmen and the ideologist of Mikhail Gorbachev's sweeping reforms of the late 1980s, died in Moscow yesterday at the age of 81.

Yakovlev, a member of the last Soviet Politburo, was one of the authors of glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, the economic and political restructuring of the Soviet Union that led to its collapse.