Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, the son of a combine harvester operator. Both grandfathers were arrested in the Stalinist purges; his maternal grandfather survived the Gulag. Gorbachev himself drove a combine during school holidays and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour at nineteen. He enrolled at Moscow State University's law faculty in 1950, one of the rare provincial students to reach Moscow's elite institutions, where he met and fell deeply in love with Raisa Titarenko, a philosophy student he married in 1953. She remained his closest confidant until her death from leukemia in September 1999 — he wept publicly at her funeral, a display of private emotion that was itself a statement about the kind of Soviet official he refused to be. He rose through the Stavropol party apparatus with notable speed, becoming first secretary of the Stavropol regional party committee in 1970. His region was a summer resort for the Soviet leadership, and he developed close relationships with Yuri Andropov and the ideologist Mikhail Suslov through those encounters. Brought to Moscow as Secretary of the Central Committee for Agriculture in 1978, he joined the Politburo as a full member in 1980. When Andropov became General Secretary in 1982 and identified Gorbachev as his preferred successor, Gorbachev's trajectory was settled. After the brief and failing tenures of Andropov (died February 1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (died March 1985), the Politburo elected Gorbachev General Secretary on 11 March 1985. He was fifty-four, by far the youngest member of the Politburo's elderly ruling circle. The scale of the crisis he inherited became vivid on 26 April 1986 when Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded in Ukraine. The Soviet state's initial instinct was to conceal; Gorbachev's own response was delayed and inadequate for several critical days. But Chernobyl ultimately reinforced his conviction that the system's culture of secrecy and falsified reporting was incompatible with survival. '' — openness — went from a rhetorical commitment to a practice that allowed the Soviet press to report Chernobyl honestly, to publish previously banned literature, and eventually to question the foundations of the Soviet state itself. '' — restructuring — tried to inject market mechanisms into the planned economy and democratise party decision-making without abandoning the single-party framework. Both policies unleashed forces Gorbachev could not control. In foreign policy he moved faster and more decisively than at home. He met Ronald Reagan at Geneva in November 1985 and at Reykjavik in October 1986, where the two leaders came startlingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in Washington in December 1987, eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons — the first actual reduction in superpower arsenals rather than a cap on their growth. In 1989 he signalled that the Soviet Union would not use military force to preserve communist governments in Eastern Europe. One by one, between August and December, the satellite regimes fell — Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania. The Berlin Wall opened on the night of 9 November 1989; crowds danced on top of it. Gorbachev told East German leader Erich Honecker in East Berlin on 7 October 1989: 'Life punishes those who come too late.' The Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1990. Inside the Soviet Union, had released nationalisms the Communist Party could no longer contain. The Baltic states declared independence; Azerbaijan and Armenia went to war; Georgia, Ukraine, and the Central Asian republics pushed toward sovereignty. The coup of 19 August 1991 — an attempt by hardline Communists to reverse his reforms — failed after three days when Russian President Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the Russian parliament and the army refused to fire. Gorbachev returned from house arrest in Crimea, but power had moved to Yeltsin. On 25 December 1991, in a television address watched worldwide, Gorbachev announced his resignation as President of the Soviet Union. The red flag over the Kremlin came down that evening. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, seventy-four years old, ceased to exist. Gorbachev spent his final decades at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow, writing, lecturing, and endorsing political causes from environmentalism to nuclear disarmament, increasingly at odds with Vladimir Putin's Russia. He died on 30 August 2022 in Moscow, aged ninety-one.

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