Moscow’s top investigator speaks out on the latest developments in the Wallenberg case

Aleksandr Yakovlev is considered Russia’s most authoritative voice on Soviet-era repression. Often described as the architect of the USSR’s policy of glasnost (openness) under former president Mikhail Gorbachev, he has spent more than a decade clearing the names of about four million people killed or imprisoned during the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Among those victims: Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who bribed and tricked the Nazis into sparing thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II. WALLENBERG disappeared in Budapest in January,1945, on his way to meet the commanders of the Soviet troops occupying the Hungarian capital. Even today, his fate remains a mystery. Although Russian authorities finally acknowledged last December that their forces had arrested the Swede on espionage charges and held him until he died in a Soviet prison two-and-a-half years later, a joint Russian-Swedish team reported on Jan. 12 that it could not agree on whether Wallenberg is dead or alive. Officially, the Russians say Wallenberg died of a heart attack in 1947. But Yakovlev, the chairman of Russia’s Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, believes Wallenberg was executed as a spy that same year.