Mikhail Gorbachev
—Jason
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Few people have had as major an impact on their century as Mikhail Gorbachev had on the twentieth. As the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev attempted to reform the Soviet Communist Party, but ultimately ushered in the end of the Cold War via the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. His efforts to provide both reform and openness for the Soviet Union, its people, and politics led to a transformation of the world order that is still playing out today.
Mikhail Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in the village of Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, in the former Soviet Union. Stavropol Krai is in north Caucus region of southern Russia. At the time of Gorbachev’s birth, Privolnoye’s population consisted of an almost even mix of ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. This intermingled identity was mirrored in Gorbachev’s family: his father was Russian, and his mother was Ukrainian.
Due to the increased social and political tensions in the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s reign, Gorbachev’s village and family were subjected to devastating consequences. Between 1932 and 1933, a major famine caused by Stalin’s agricultural collectivization program led to horror: half the population of Privolnoye, including two of Gorbachev’s uncles and an aunt, died of starvation.
Following almost immediately on the heels of the famine, further damage was done by Stalin’s Great Purge. Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather, Sergei, was an early Communist Party member who had created the first collective farm in the region; despite this, he was arrested by the secret police in 1934. Gorbachev’s paternal grandfather was also arrested and sent to a Gulag for reeducation beginning in 1937.
Stunned by these arrests Gorbachev’s mother, Maria, sent three-year-old Mikhail to live with her mother in 1934. Eventually both grandfathers were released, and the family reunited, but this was overshadowed by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. By June 1941, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union prompting the Gorbachev’s again send their son away from his home as the Germans briefly occupied the region. Surprisingly, all the members of the Gorbachev family survived the Second World War and life slowly returned to a state of “normal” following 1945.
After finishing his primary schooling and joining Komsomol, the youth division of Communist Party, Gorbachev set his sights on Moscow State University to study law. The entrance exam was waived because he had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for his family’s service rebuilding the agriculture of his home village in 1948. Once at MSU, Gorbachev gained a reputation for hard work and acting as a mediator in disputes between students. While he kept many of his personal views private, Gorbachev was an outspoken student in his classes.
His character had been shaped in part by the experiences of his grandparents. For example, he stated that he did not support the Soviet ideology that a confession meant guilt. Gorbachev argued amongst friends that a confession forced via torture couldn’t be trusted as true, an idea in direct opposition to practices used and supported by the KGB.
Another example of Gorbachev’s desire for reform and openness occurred while he was still a student at Moscow State University. During the antisemitic Soviet campaign known as the Doctor’s Plot (1951-1953), Gorbachev publicly defended a Jewish student from denunciation and expulsion. The Doctor’s Plot was a conspiracy theory tailored by Stalin that claimed Jewish medical professionals were attempting to assassinate the Soviet leadership. This was intended to push the remaining Soviet Jews out of positions of power. Gorbachev vehemently defended his fellow student and prevented him from being further harassed. This brought him to the attention of the university leadership as a man who held to his principles.
In 1952, Gorbachev was appointed as a full member of the Communist Party. As a party and Komsomol member he was tasked with monitoring fellow students for potential subversion, but he did not actively engage in these duties. Gorbachev’s responsibilities extended outside the university as well: his first assignment was to oversee the election polls in Moscow itself.
Stalin’s death in 1953 finally ended the widespread persecution of ethnic minorities. The new government that formed under Nikita Khrushchev dropped the Doctor’s Case after no new “evidence” was found or generated. Khrushchev went even further when he publicly denouncing Stalin’s purges and destructive policies and promising to reform the Soviet Union.
While at Moscow State University, Gorbachev met Raisa Titarenko, a Ukrainian woman studying in the university's philosophy department. On 25 September 1953, he and Raisa registered their marriage at Sokolniki Registry Office. Their marriage almost ended early on when Raisa fell ill and needed a life-saving abortion.
In June 1955, Gorbachev graduated with a distinction and was briefly assigned to the Soviet Procurator's office, which was then focused on the rehabilitation of the innocent victims of Stalin's purges. He was then assigned to Stavropol, in southwest Russia; he and Raisa moved to their new home in the summer of 1955.
Gorbachev became deputy director of Komsomol's agitation and propaganda department for that region. This allowed him to visit the surrounding villages and discuss with the people living there how to improve their lives. Khrushchev’s premiership was a welcome boon to the Soviet people and Gorbachev. The anti-Stalinist reforms meant less overall misery for the people in general and in addition allowed members of the targeted ethnic groups to return home.
Gorbachev was among those who saw themselves as "genuine Marxists" or "genuine Leninists" in contrast to what they regarded as the perversions of Stalin. The local administration regarded him as politically reliable allowing him to rise steadily through the ranks. He was known to flatter his superiors, thereby gaining favor with prominent local politician Fyodor Kulakov. His ability to outmaneuver rivals caused some colleagues to resent his success.
In March 1961, Gorbachev became First Secretary of the regional Komsomol, from which position he went out of his way to appoint women as city and district leaders. In January 1963, Gorbachev was promoted to personnel chief for the regional party's agricultural committee and, in September 1966, became First Secretary of the Stavropol City Party Organization, otherwise known as the "Gorkom.”
In August 1968, Gorbachev was named Second Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, deputy of First Secretary Leonid Yefremov and the second most senior figure in the Stavrapol region. In April 1970, Yefremov was promoted, allowing Gorbachev to succeed him as the First Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom. This granted him significant power over the Stavropol region and positioned him to take on more prominent roles.
He had, in fact, been personally vetted for the position by senior Kremlin leaders and was informed of their decision by the Soviet leader himself, Leonid Brezhnev. At age 39, Gorbachev was an outlier both because he was a reformist and was a relatively young man in a position of power. As head of the Stavropol region, he had a seat with Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This gave him an insider track with the more senior leaders of the Soviet Union.
The attention of powerful members of the Party allowed Gorbachev and his wife to spend their holidays in Moscow, Leningrad, Uzbekistan, and resorts in the North Caucasus; here he spent time with the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who had a favorable opinion of him and became an important patron. Gorbachev was believed sufficiently reliable to be included in Soviet delegations to Western Europe; he made five trips there between 1970 and 1977.
In November 1978, Gorbachev was appointed with unanimous approval a Secretary of the Central Committee. He replaced his old friend, Fyodor Kulakov, in the Secretariat for Agricultural after the later had died of a heart attack. Gorbachev concentrated his attentions on agriculture: the harvests of 1979, 1980, and 1981 were all poor, due largely to weather conditions, and the country had to import increasing quantities of grain.
While his position concentrated his attention on agricultural issues, concerns about other Soviet policies. In particular, December 1979 deployment of the Red Army into neighboring Afghanistan to support its Soviet-aligned government against Islamist insurgents; Gorbachev privately thought this a mistake. The Soviet-Afghan War, fought over the next decade, damaged the USSR more than any other policies of the era. Despite hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers occupying Afghanistan, they were forced to leave the country in defeat in 1989.
After the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982, Yuri Andropov became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Gorbachev was enthusiastic about the appointment and hoped that reforms which had stalled would be revived. However, there was no opportunity as Andropov died in February 1984.
On his deathbed, Andropov had indicated his desire that Gorbachev succeed him. Many in the Central Committee nevertheless thought the 53-year-old Gorbachev was too young and inexperienced. Instead, Konstantin Chernenko—a longstanding Brezhnev ally—was appointed General Secretary, but he too was in very poor health. He spent nearly his entire time as General Secretary in the intensive care ward of the Moscow hospital. He died on 10 March 1985.
Gorbachev expected much opposition to his nomination to succeed Chernenko as General Secretary, but the Politburo unanimously elected him. They did not want another elderly leader. Few in the government imagined that he would be as radical a reformer as he proved to be. Although Gorbachev was not well-known to the Soviet public, there was widespread relief that the new leader was not elderly and ailing.
Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the USSR in March 1985. He was unlike his predecessors in his belief for reforms. To the West, Gorbachev was seen as more moderate and less threatening; though some Western commentators believed this was an act to lull Western governments into a false sense of security. They soon learned that he was genuine in his desire for reform, but he had to be cautious. Gorbachev was aware that the Politburo could remove him from office and so he could not pursue more radical reform without many supporters in the body. He sought to remove several older members from the Politburo.
Gorbachev recurrently employed the term perestroika, first using publicly a year before his appointment as General Secretary in March 1984. Perestroika encompassed a complex series of reforms to restructure society and the economy. He was concerned that the country's low productivity, poor work ethic, and inferior quality goods would lead to the country being reduced to a second-rate power. He was very clear, however, that the purpose of reform was to prop up and improve the centrally planned economy—not to transition to market socialism.
In 1987, Gorbachev began speaking of glasnost, or "openness." This meant greater transparency in government affairs and allowing for open debate on political issues. Reformers found themselves in prominent media positions, encouraged by a more liberal atmosphere which allowed criticisms of the Soviet government and economy to be voiced, thereby reinforcing Gorbachev’s attempts at reform.
Gorbachev saw glasnost as a necessary measure to ensure perestroika by alerting the Soviet populace to the nature of the country's problems in the hope that they would support his efforts to fix them. Particularly popular among the Soviet intelligentsia, who became key Gorbachev supporters, glasnost boosted his domestic popularity but alarmed many Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet citizenry found this newfound freedom of speech and press—and its accompanying revelations about the country's past and present— uncomfortable at best.
In a May 1985 speech given to the Soviet Foreign Ministry—the first time a Soviet leader had directly addressed his country's diplomats—Gorbachev spoke of a "radical restructuring" of foreign policy. A major issue facing his leadership was the Soviet-Afghan War. Over the course of the war, the Soviet Army had taken heavy casualties and there was much opposition to Soviet involvement among both the public and military. Gorbachev made withdrawal from the war a key priority.
Gorbachev had inherited a renewed period of high tension in the Cold War. Appalled by the potential of nuclear war. He sought to improve relations with the United States. U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s seeming desire to escalate, as the US scrapped détente and arms controls, and initiated a military build-up, while Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the "evil empire."
Both Gorbachev and Reagan wanted open lines of communication, but each faced some opposition within their respective governments. They agreed to hold a summit in Geneva, Switzerland in November 1985. These discussions between Gorbachev and Reagan were sometimes heated, and Gorbachev was initially frustrated, saying his US counterpart "does not seem to hear what I am trying to say."
In January 1986, Gorbachev publicly proposed a three-stage program for abolishing the world's nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century. An agreement was then reached to meet with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland in October 1986. Gorbachev wanted to secure guarantees that the American Strategic Defense Initiative would not be implemented, and in return was willing to offer concessions, including a 50% reduction in Soviet long range nuclear missiles.
Gorbachev’s plans were derailed by the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986. In the immediate aftermath, officials fed Gorbachev incorrect information to downplay the incident. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, 336,000 people were evacuated from the area around the nuclear plant. He later used the disaster as an example of what he regarded as widespread problems in Soviet society, such as shoddy workmanship and workplace inertia, problems he sought to fix with his program of perestroika.
The increasingly horrific consequences of the Chernobyl Disaster and Soviet-Afghan War further strained an already struggling Soviet Union. Following the failure of talks with the U.S., Gorbachev held a conference in Moscow in February 1987 titled "For a World without Nuclear Weapons, for Mankind's Survival." This was attended by various international celebrities and politicians and was viewed positively outside the USSR. Inside the USSR, however, there was hostility to such compromises, particularly from the Soviet military.
A second U.S.-Soviet summit occurred in Moscow in May and June 1988, which Gorbachev expected to be largely symbolic. Again, he and Reagan criticized each other's countries—Reagan criticized Soviet restrictions on religious freedom; Gorbachev highlighted poverty and racial discrimination in the U.S. However, Gorbachev related that they spoke "on friendly terms."
A third summit was held in New York City in December of that year. Gorbachev gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he announced a unilateral reduction of the Soviet armed forces by 500,000 soldiers and that 50,000 soldiers would be withdrawn from Central and Eastern Europe.
Gorbachev tenure in office saw unrest among the different national groups existed within the Soviet Union. In December 1986, riots broke out in several Kazakh cities after a Russian was appointed head of the region. In 1987, Crimean Tatars protested in Moscow to demand resettlement in Crimea, the area from which they had been deported on Stalin's orders in 1944. Gorbachev ordered a commission to examine the situation. Further ethnic and nationalist troubles emerged in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Sentiments, favoring independence were also rising in the Baltic states: the Supreme Soviets of the Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian Soviet Socialist Republics declared economic "autonomy" from Russia and introduced measures to restrict Russian immigration. In August 1989, protesters formed the Baltic Way, a human chain across the three republics to symbolize their wish for independence.
In the face of these movements, Gorbachev rejected the "Brezhnev Doctrine," the idea that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene militarily in other Marxist–Leninist countries if their communist governments were threatened. While pursuing domestic reforms, he did not publicly support reform elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Hoping instead to lead by example, he later related that he did not want to interfere in their internal affairs, and so removed 50,000 troops from both Eastern and Central Europe.
In 1988, Gorbachev drafted plans for reforms that would shift power away from the Politburo and towards the soviets, the local governments. The soviets had become largely powerless bodies that rubber-stamped Politburo policies; he wanted them to become year-round legislatures which actually governed. He proposed the formation of a new institution, the Congress of People's Deputies, whose members were to be elected in a largely free vote.
In March 1988, the Congress of People's Deputies held the first (and only) Soviet presidential election, in which Gorbachev was the only candidate. Through this, he became the first executive President of the Soviet Union. At the same Congress meeting, he presented the idea of repealing Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which had ratified the Communist Party as the ruling party of the Soviet Union. The Congress passed the reform, undermining the de jure nature of the one-party state.
In the 1990 elections for the Russian Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party faced challengers from an opposition party, as alliance of liberalizers called Democratic Russia who did particularly well in urban centers. Their candidate, Boris Yeltsin, was elected the parliament's chair, something Gorbachev was unhappy about. The Russian Supreme Soviet was now out of Gorbachev's control; in June 1990, it declared that in the Russian Republic its laws took precedence over those of the Soviet Central Government.
Domestically, Gorbachev's critics accused him of betraying the national interest; more broadly, they were angry that Gorbachev had allowed the Eastern Bloc to move away from direct Soviet influence. With the Soviet budget deficit climbing and no domestic money markets to provide the state with loans, Gorbachev looked elsewhere. Throughout 1991, Gorbachev requested sizable loans from Western countries and Japan, hoping to keep the Soviet economy afloat and to ensure the success of perestroika.
At the 28th Communist Party Congress in July 1990, hardliners criticized the reformists, but Gorbachev was re-elected party leader with the support of three-quarters of delegates and his choice for Deputy General Secretary, Vladimir Ivashko, was also elected. Seeking compromise with the liberalizers, Gorbachev assembled a team of both his own and Yeltsin's advisers to come up with an economic reform package: the result was the "500 Days" program. which called for further decentralization and some privatization.
By mid-November 1990, much of the Russian press was calling for Gorbachev to resign and was predicting civil war. Hardliners urged Gorbachev to disband the presidential council and to arrest vocal liberals in the media. In January 1991, amid growing dissent in the Baltics states, Gorbachev demanded that the Lithuanian Supreme Council rescind its pro-independence reforms. Soviet troops occupied several buildings in the city of Vilnius and clashed with protesters, 15 of whom were killed. Gorbachev was widely blamed by liberalizers, with Yeltsin calling for his resignation.
Fearing more civil disturbances, that month Gorbachev banned demonstrations and ordered troops to patrol Soviet cities alongside the police. This further alienated the liberalizers but was not enough to win over hardliners. In August, Gorbachev and his family holidayed at their summerhouse, "Zarya" ('Dawn') in Foros, Crimea. Two weeks into his holiday, a group of senior Communist Party figures—the "Gang of Eight"—calling themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency launched a coup d'état to seize control of the Soviet Union.
The coup leaders demanded that Gorbachev formally declare a state of emergency in the country, but he refused. Gorbachev and his family were kept under house arrest in their dacha. Yeltsin, now President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, went inside the Moscow White House. Tens of thousands of protesters amassed outside it to prevent troops storming the building to arrest him. Gorbachev feared that the coup plotters would order him killed, so had his guards barricade his dacha.
On 21 August, Yeltsin’s allies arrived at Gorbachev's dacha to inform him that they were there to return him to the capital. That evening, Gorbachev returned to Moscow, where he thanked Yeltsin and the protesters for helping to undermine the coup. Two days later, he resigned as its General Secretary and called on the Central Committee to dissolve. Several members of the coup committed suicide; others were fired. Yeltsin then announced the suspension of the activities of the Russian Communist Party.
On 29 August 1991, the Supreme Soviet indefinitely suspended all Communist Party activity, effectively ending Communist rule in the Soviet Union (on 6 November, Yeltsin issued a decree banning all Communist Party activities in Russia). From then on, the Soviet Union collapsed with dramatic speed. By the end of September, Gorbachev had lost the ability to influence events outside of Moscow.
Gorbachev reached a deal with Yeltsin that called for Gorbachev to formally announce his resignation as Soviet President and Commander-in-Chief on 25 December, after which he would have four days to vacate the Kremlim. On 26 December, the Soviet of the Republics, the upper house of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, formally voted the Soviet Union out of existence. The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1991.
Gorbachev spent the next few years establishing and running the International Foundation for Socio-Economic & Political Studies (the Gorbachev Foundation). To fund it, he went on speaking tours and even did a commercial for Pizza Hut. He became openly critical of Yeltsin and ran against him in the 1996 Russian election, but lost.
He continued his reformist work into the presidency of Vladimir Putin, beginning in 1999, but soon grew critical of Putin as he saw that he was not the agent of reform he had believed him to be. He continued to work with the Foundation, travelling and speaking worldwide and when he was in the U.S., spending time in a house belonging to the Reagan family. His wife Raisa died of cancer in 1999.
In the last two decades of his life, ne became increasingly outspoken in his opposition to war and war mongering and worked toward peace. Though he stopped travelling in late 2010s, he still made statements on political issues until shortly before his death on 30 August 2022.