Mikhail Gorbachev

• Born: 2 March 1931
• Birthplace: Privolnoye, Stavropol, Russia
• Best Known As: The Nobel Prize-winning last leader of the Soviet Union

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1985 until its collapse in December of 1991. Gorbachev trained as a lawyer at Moscow State University. He joined the Communist Party (CPSU) in 1952 and went into politics after earning his law degree in 1955. In the Stavropol region of the north Caucasus he was a party official after 1962, was made first secretary in 1970 and was elected to the CPSU central committee in 1971. Gorbachev went to Moscow in 1978 as the central committee's secretary for agriculture, and after that rose through the ranks, thanks in large part to party patron Yuri Andropov, who became CPSU general secretary in 1982. Gorbachev was then elected general secretary in 1985 after the deaths of Andropov (in 1984) and his short-lived successor, Konstantin Chernenko. Gorbachev embarked on economic reforms and diplomatic overtures to the West that led to meetings with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the U.K. and President Ronald Reagan of the U.S. (1985-88). Officially the head of state after 1988, Gorbachev launched programs, dubbed glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring"), that were supposed to make the state more efficient and less corrupt, but resulted in public discontent and nationalistic urges among the Soviet Union's satellite republics. While balancing opposition from the left and right, Gorbachev was elected to the the newly-fashioned office of President of the USSR in 1990, with broad powers. He survived a coup attempt in August of 1991, but resigned from his post on 25 December 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1992 he began the Gorbachev Foundation, a think-tank for international issues, and now speaks and writes on history, politics and international affairs. His memoir, Life and Reforms, was published in 1995.

Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, was a highly visible part of his international travels; she died in 1999... Gorbachev, who was sometimes called "Gorby" in the press, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990... His fiercest political rival from the left was Boris Yeltsin, who became the first president of the new Russian Federation in 1991... Gorbachev had a prominent "port wine stain" birthmark on his scalp above his right eye; it was sometimes airbrushed out of official photographs... Some experts suggest that one reason Gorbachev was not a popular president was his restriction on the manufacture and distribution of alcohol, especially vodka... In his official online biography, this is given as the explanation for the collapse of the USSR: "Destructive social and ethnic developments, which the emerging Soviet democracy was unable to curb, eventually led to the disintegration of the multinational Union of republics that Gorbachev led."

(b. Stavropol region of southern Russia, 2 Mar. 1931) Russian; General Secretary of the CPSU 1985 – 91 Gorbachev was born into a peasant family. He entered the Law Faculty of Moscow State University in 1950, graduating with top marks in 1955. He joined the CPSU in 1952. From 1956 he followed a career in the Communist Youth League (Comsomol) in the Stavropol region, before joining the local party apparatus in 1962. In 1967 he graduated from Stavropol Agricultural Institute. In 1970 he became First Secretary of the Stavropol region. Next year he was elected to the Central Committee. In 1978 he moved to Moscow as secretary of the Central Committee in charge of agriculture. He enjoyed the patronage of Andropov, who made him a full member of the Politburo in 1980.

After Andropov was elected Soviet leader in November 1982, Gorbachev became the second most powerful man in the USSR, with a brief covering the whole economy. His powers increased during the brief reign of Chernenko from 1984 to 1985. After Chernenko's death in March 1985, Gorbachev's bid for the general secretaryship was strongly resisted by the Brezhnevites within the Politburo, whom he defeated with the support of Ligachev and Gromyko. Gorbachev became President of the USSR after Gromyko's forced retirement in 1988.

Gorbachev's reforms revolved around the restructuring (perestroika) of the economy and increased freedom of expression (glasnost) in political and cultural affairs. He did not follow a precise blueprint in either area and it is debatable how far his policies were forced upon him by the economic crisis and growth of national unrest within the Soviet Union, which worsened with each year of his rule. He was unwilling to remove the clause of the constitution guaranteeing the "leading role" of the Communist Party, but after 1988 undermined its power by allowing partially free elections to the legislatures in the union republics and to the Congress of People's Deputies and by augmenting the power of the presidency. This did nothing to prevent the growing self-assertiveness of the Russian (as distinct from) the Soviet Communist Party. By 1990 Gorbachev's hold on power was shaky and he was unable to satisfy the demands of conservative Communists demanding the maintenance of the Soviet Union and the party-state and of the nationalists in the republics at a time when the economy was breaking down. In August 1991, Gorbachev's opponents within the leadership staged a coup to save the union, placing him under house arrest. They surrendered three days later, having failed to win the support of either the people or the army. On his return to power, Gorbachev resigned as party leader. In December 1991 he resigned as President when the Soviet Union was voted out of existence by the representatives of its constituent republics. In 1992 Gorbachev was expelled from the CPSU for causing the collapse of the USSR.

In international affairs Gorbachev oversaw the withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan, a great improvement of relations with the USA and European Community, and the normalization of relations with China. In Eastern Europe in 1989 he accepted the trade union movement Solidarity's electoral victory in Poland and then encouraged the overthrow of hard-line regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, while maintaining a policy of strict non-intervention once revolutions had started. He co-operated with the US-led UN forces during the Gulf War against Iraq in 1990 – 1, even though it was a former Soviet ally.

Since 1991 Gorbachev has been head of the Moscow-based "Gorbachev Fund", a centre for the study of international relations.

Gorbachev, Mikhail (1931-) Soviet statesman, and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985-91) and President (1988-91). His foreign policy brought about an end to the Cold War, while within the USSR he introduced major reforms known as glasnost and perestroika. He resigned following an attempted coup. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev (born 1931) was a member of the Communist Party who rose through a series of local and regional positions to national prominence. In March 1985 the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party elected him general secretary of the party and leader of the U.S.S.R. He resigned in 1991.

Mikhail Gorbachev was born into a peasant family in the village of Privolnoe, near Stavropol, on March 2, 1931, and grew up in the countryside. As a teenager, he worked driving farm machinery at a local machine-tractor station. These stations served regional state and collective farms, but were also centers of police control in the countryside. Gorbachev's experience here undoubtedly educated him well about the serious problems of food production and political administration in the countryside, as well as the practices of the KGB (the Soviet secret police) control, knowledge which would serve him well in his future career.

In 1952 Gorbachev joined the Communist Party and began studies at the Moscow State University, where he graduated from the law division in 1955. Student acquaintances from these years describe him as bright, hard working, and careful to establish good contacts with people of importance. He also met and married fellow student Raisa Titorenko, in 1953.

With Stalin's death in 1953 the Soviet Union began a period of political and intellectual ferment. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and paved the way for a major restructuring of the Soviet Union's political system and economic administration. For young party activists like Gorbachev this was a period of exciting innovations and challenges.

Gorbachev returned after his graduation to Stavropol as an organizer for the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and began a successful career as a party administrator and regional leader. In 1962 he was promoted to the post of party organizer for collective and state farms in the Stavropol region and soon took on major responsibilities for the Stavropol city committee as well. Leonid Brezhnev rewarded his ability by appointing him Stavropol first secretary in 1966, roughly equivalent to mayor.

Climbing the Party Ladder

Soon afterwards, as part of the party's new campaign to assure that its best career administrators were thoroughly trained in economic administration, Gorbachev completed an advanced program at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute and received a degree in agrarian economics. With this additional training he moved quickly to assume direction of the party in the entire Stavropol region, assuming in 1970 the important post of first secretary for the Stavropol Territorial Party Committee. This position, roughly equivalent to a governor in the United States, proved a stepping stone to Central Committee membership and national prominence.

Gorbachev was assisted in his rise to national power by close associations with Yuri Andropov, who was also from the Stavropol region, and Mikhail Suslov, the party's principal ideologist and a confidant of Leonid Brezhnev, who had once worked in the Stavropol area as well. Gorbachev also proved himself a shrewd and intelligent administrator, however, with an extensive knowledge of agricultural affairs, and it was largely on this basis that Brezhnev brought him to Moscow in 1978 as a party secretary responsible for agricultural administration. His performance in this capacity was not particularly distinguished. The Soviet Union suffered several poor harvests in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its dependency on foreign grain imports increased. Yet Gorbachev gained a solid reputation, despite these problems, as an energetic and informed politician, with an activist style contrasting rather sharply with that of most aging Kremlin leaders.

The ascension of Yuri Andropov to power after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in January 1980 greatly strengthened the position of his protegé Gorbachev. Both men showed impatience with outmoded administrative practices and with the inefficiences of the Soviet Union's economy. Andropov's death returned the U.S.S.R. briefly to a period of drift under the weak and ailing Konstantin Chernenko, but Gorbachev continued to impress his colleagues with his loyal and energetic party service. Beginning in October 1980 he was a member of the ruling Politburo.

A New Type of Russian Leader?

As he took power in March 1985, Gorbachev brought a fresh new spirit to the Kremlin. Young, vigorous, married to an attractive and stylish woman with a Ph.D., he represented a new generation of Soviet leaders, educated and trained in the post-Stalin era and free from the direct experiences of Stalin's terror which so hardened and corrupted many of his elders. His first steps as head of the party were designed to improve economic productivity. He began an energetic campaign against inefficiency and waste and indicated his intention to "shake up" lazy and ineffective workers in every area of Soviet life, including the party. He also revealed an unusual affability. Britons found him and his wife Raisa "charming" when he visited England in December 1984, and he showed a ready wit, "blaming" the British Museum, where Karl Marx studied and wrote, for Communism's success. Shortly after taking power Gorbachev also moved to develop greater rapport with ordinary citizens, taking to the streets on several occasions to discuss his views and making a number of well-publicized appearances at factories and other industrial institutions. In addition, he began strengthening his position within the party with a number of new appointments at the important regional level.

A charismatic personality, Gorbachev also had the youthfulness, training, intelligence, and political strength to become one of the Soviet Union's most popular leaders. Upon assuming power in 1985, he was faced with the need to make significant improvements in the Soviet Union's troubled economy - an extremely difficult task - and to establish better relations with the United States, which might allow some reduction in Soviet defense expenditures in favor of consumer goods. In November 1985 he met with President Reagan in Geneva to discuss national and international problems. Little progress was made but both leaders agreed to hold another "summit" meeting in the United States in 1986.

When new tensions developed between the two superpowers, the leaders agreed to hold a preliminary meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, October 11-12, 1986. But the clearest signs of improving Soviet-American relations came in 1988. Gorbachev made a positive impression when he entered a crowd of spectators in New York City to shake hands with people. In May and June of the same year, President Reagan visited Moscow.

Within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev promoted spectacular political changes. His most important measure came in 1989 when he set up elections in which members of the Communist Party had to compete against opponents who were not Party members. Later that same year, he called for an end to the special status of the Communist party guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution and ended the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan.

Two issues, however, caused growing difficulty for Gorbachev. First, there was the problem of nationalities, as the Soviet Union consisted of nearly 100 different ethnic groups. As the political dictatorship began to disappear, many of these groups began to engage in open warfare against each other. Such bloodshed came from longstanding local quarrels that had been suppressed under Moscow's earlier control. Even more serious, some ethnic groups, like the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians began to call for outright independence. Second, the country's economy was sinking deeper into crisis. Both industrial and agricultural production were declining, and the old system, in which the economy ran under centralized control of the government, no longer seemed to work.

Yet, Gorbachev was apparently more willing to make changes in government and international affairs than to focus on the problems associated with ethnic diversity and the economy. Perhaps influenced by more conservative rivals, he cracked down on the Lithuanians when they declared their independence in the summer of 1990. Also, he gradually tried to move toward a private system of farming and privately-owned industry.

At the same time, a powerful rival began to emerge: once considered an ally, Boris Yeltsin became the country's leading advocate of radical economic reform. Although forced from the Politburo, the small group at the top of the Communist Party, in 1987, Yeltsin soon established his own political base. He formally left the Communist Party in 1990, something Gorbachev refused to do, and was elected president of the Russian Republic in June 1991. Gorbachev, on the other hand, had been made president of the Soviet Union without having to win a national election. Thus, Yeltsin could claim a greater degree of popular support.

Fall From Power

In August 1991, a group of Communist Party conservatives captured Gorbachev while he was on vacation in the Crimea and moved to seize power. Some of these men, like Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, were individuals Gorbachev had put in power to balance the liberal and conservative political forces. But Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, led the successful resistance to the coup, which collapsed within a few days. When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he was overshadowed by Yeltsin, and there were rumors that Gorbachev himself had been involved in the coup.

By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had fallen apart. When most of its major components like the Ukraine and the Baltic states declared themselves as independent, real power began to rest with the leaders of those components, among them Yeltsin, hero of the attempted coup and president of the Russian Republic. Gorbachev formally resigned his remaining political office on Christmas Day 1991.

Private Citizen

As a private citizen, Gorbachev faded from public view, but continued to write and travel. On one occasion, his travels struck an important symbolic note. On May 6, 1992, he spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. There, in 1946, Winston Churchill had given his classic speech coining the term "the Cold War." Gorbachev's appearance was a vivid reminder of the changes he had helped bring about during his seven years in power.

In the spring of 1995, Gorbachev began touring factories in Russia, spoke to university students, and denounced President Yeltsin. He stopped just short of formally announcing his candidacy for the presidency in 1996. He wrote an autobiography, which was released in 1995 in Germany and 1997 in the United States.

Like many historical figures, Gorbachev's role will be interpreted in varying ways. While a Russian factory worker stated in Newsweek, "He destroyed a great state … the collapse of the Soviet Union started with Gorbachev …," some critics in the West saw the fall of Communism as "altogether a victory for common sense, reason, democracy and common human values."

Further Reading

The political tasks Gorbachev faced are well documented in several studies of the Soviet system. These include Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (1980), George Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (1982), and Dusko Doder, Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev (1986). The first book-length study of the Soviet leader was Thomas G. Butson, Gorbachev: A Biography (1985). The second full-life account was Zhores A. Medveder, Gorbachev (1986). Articles on Contemporary Soviet affairs can also be found every other month in the journal Problems of Communism, which tracks Gorbachev's performance in a number of areas. Helpful magazine articles can be found in U.S. News & World Report (November 25, 1996); National Review (November 25, 1996); and Newsweek (March 13, 1995). Gorbachev's autobiography Memoirs was released in the United States in 1997. A summary of Gorbachev's political career can be accessed online at the A&E Biography website at http://www.biography.com (August 5, 1997).

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Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985. (credit: Colton — Picture Search/Black Star)

(born March 2, 1931, Privolye, Stavropol region, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Soviet official and last president of the Soviet Union (1990 – 91). After earning a law degree from Moscow State University (1955), he rose through the ranks to become a full Politburo member (1980) and general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985 – 91). His extraordinary reform policies of glasnost and perestroika were resisted by party bureaucrats; to reduce their power, Gorbachev changed the Soviet constitution in 1988 to allow multicandidate elections and removed the monopoly power of the party in 1990. He cultivated warmer relations with the U.S., and in 1989 – 90 he supported the democratically elected governments that replaced the communist regimes of eastern Europe. In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Russia's economic and political problems led to a 1991 coup attempt by hard-liners. In alliance with president Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev quit the Communist Party, disbanded its Central Committee, and shifted political powers to the Soviet Union's constituent republics. Events outpaced him, and the various republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States under Yeltsin's leadership. On Dec. 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned the presidency of the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist that same day.

For more information on Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, visit Britannica.com.

(b. 1931), Soviet political leader, general editor of the CPSU (1985 - 1991), president of the Soviet Union (1990 - 1991), Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1990).

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union during a period of sweeping domestic and international change that saw the dismantling of communist systems throughout Europe and ended with the disintegration of the USSR itself, was born in the southern Russian village of Privolnoye in Stavropol province. His parents were peasants and his mother was barely literate.

Mikhail Gorbachev did not have an easy childhood. Born on March 2, 1931, he was just old enough to remember when, during the 1930s, both of his grandfathers were caught in the purges and arrested. Although they were released after prison, having been tortured in one case and internally exiled and used as forced labor in the other, young Misha Gorbachev knew what it was like to live in the home of an enemy of the people.

The war and early postwar years provided the family with the opportunity to recover from the stigma of false charges laid against the older generation, although the wartime experience itself was harsh. Gorbachev's father was in the army, saw action on several fronts, and was twice wounded. Remaining in the Russian countryside, Gorbachev and his mother had to engage in back-breaking work in the fields. For two years Gorbachev received no schooling, and for a period of four and one-half months the Stavropol territory, including Privolnoye, was occupied by the German army. In Josef Stalin's time, those who had experienced even short-lived foreign rule tended to be treated with grave suspicion.

Nevertheless, the Gorbachevs engaged as whole-heartedly in the postwar reconstruction of their locality as they had in the war effort. Exceptionally, when he was still a teenager, Gorbachev was awarded the Order of Red Banner of Labor for heroic feats of work. He had assisted his father, a combine operator (who was given the Order of Lenin) in bringing in a record harvest in 1948. The odds against a village boy gaining entry to Moscow State University in 1950 were high, but the fact that Gorbachev had been honored as an exemplary worker, and had an excellent school record and recommendation from the Komsomol, made him one of the exceptions. While still at high school during the first half of 1950, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party. He was admitted to full membership in the party in 1952.

Although the Law Faculty of Moscow University, where Gorbachev studied for the next five years, hardly offered a liberal education, there were some scholars of genuine erudition who opened his eyes to a wider intellectual world. Prominent among them was Stepan Fyodorovich Kechekyan, who taught the history of legal and political thought. Gorbachev took Marxism seriously and not simply as Marxist-Leninist formula to be learned by rote. Talking, forty years later, about his years as a law student, Gorbachev observed: "Before the university I was trapped in my belief system in the sense that I accepted a great deal as given, assumptions not to be questioned. At the university I began to think and reflect and to look at things differently. But of course that was only the beginning of a long process."

Two events of decisive importance for Gorbachev occurred while he was at Moscow University. One was the death of Stalin in 1953. After that the atmosphere within the university lightened, and freer discussion began to take place among the students. The other was his meeting Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, a student in the philosophy faculty, in 1951. They were married in 1953 and remained utterly devoted to each other. In an interview on the eve of his seventieth birthday, Gorbachev described Raisa's death at the age of 67 in 1999 as his "hardest blow ever." They had one daughter, Irina, and two granddaughters.

After graduating with distinction, Gorbachev returned to his native Stavropol and began a rapid rise through the Komsomol and party organization. By 1966 he was party first secretary for Stavropol city, and in 1970 he became kraikom first secretary, that is, party boss of the whole Stavropol territory, which brought with it a year later membership in the Central Committee of the CPSU. Gorbachev displayed a talent for winning the good opinion of very diverse people. These included not only men of somewhat different outlooks within the Soviet Communist Party. Later they were also to embrace Western conservatives - most notably U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher - as well as European social democrats such as the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt and Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez.

However, Gorbachev's early success in winning friends and influencing people depended not only on his ability and charm. He had an advantage in his location. Stavropol was spa territory, and leading members of the Politburo came there on holiday. The local party secretary had to meet them, and this gave Gorbachev the chance to make a good impression on figures such as Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov. Both of them later supported his promotion to the secretaryship of the Central Committee, with responsibility for agriculture, when one of Gorbachev's mentors, Fyodor Kulakov, a previous first secretary of Stavropol territory, who held the agricultural portfolio within the Central Committee Secretariat (along with membership in the Politburo), died in 1978.

From that time, Gorbachev was based in Moscow. As the youngest member of an increasingly geriatric political leadership, he was given rapid promotion through the highest echelons of the Communist Party, adding to his secretaryship candidate membership of the Politburo in 1979 and full membership in 1980. When Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, Gorbachev's duties in the Party leadership team were extended by Brezhnev's successor, Yuri Andropov, who thought highly of the younger man. When Andropov was too ill to carry on chairing meetings, he wrote an addendum to a speech to a session of the Central Committee in December 1983, which he was too ill to attend in person. In it he proposed that the Politburo and Secretariat be led in his absence by Gorbachev. This was a clear attempt to elevate Gorbachev above Konstantin Chernenko, a much older man who had been exceptionally close to Brezhnev and a senior secretary of the Central Committee for longer than Gorbachev. However, Andropov's additions to his speech were omitted from the text presented to Central Committee members. Chernenko had consulted other members of the old guard, and they were united in wishing to prevent power from moving to a new generation represented by Gorbachev.

The delay in his elevation to the general secretaryship of the Communist Party did Gorbachev no harm. Chernenko duly succeeded Andropov on the latter's death in February 1984, but was so infirm during his time at the helm that Gorbachev frequently found himself chairing meetings of the Politburo at short notice when Chernenko was too ill to attend. More importantly, the sight of a third infirm leader in a row (for Brezhnev in his last years had also been incapable of working a full day) meant that even the normally docile Central Committee might have objected if the Politburo had proposed another septuagenarian to succeed Chernenko. By the time of Chernenko's death, just thirteen months after he succeeded Andropov, Gorbachev was, moreover, in a position to get his way. As the senior surviving secretary, it was he who called the Politburo together on the very evening that Chernenko died. The next day (March 11, 1985) he was unanimously elected Soviet leader by the Central Committee, following a unanimous vote in the Politburo.

Those who chose him had little or no idea that they were electing a serious reformer. Indeed, Gorbachev himself did not know how fast and how radically his views would evolve. From the outset of his leadership he was convinced of the need for change, involving economic reform, political liberalization, ending the war in Afghanistan, and improving East-West relations. He did not yet believe that this required a fundamental transformation of the system. On the contrary, he thought it could be improved. By 1988, as Gorbachev encountered increasing resistance from conservative elements within the Communist Party, the ministries, the army, and the KGB, he had reached the conclusion that systemic change was required.

Initially, Gorbachev had made a series of personnel changes that he hoped would make a difference. Some of these appointments were bold and innovative, others turned out to be misjudged. One of his earliest appointments that took most observers by surprise was the replacement of the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, by the Georgian Party first secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, a man who had not previously set foot in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yet Shevardnadze became an imaginative and capable executor of a foreign policy aimed at ending the Cold War. At least as important a promotion was that given to Alexander Yakovlev, who was not even a candidate member of the Central Committee at the time when Gorbachev became party leader, but who by the summer of 1987 was both a secretary of the Central Committee and a full member of the Politburo. Yakovlev owed this extraordinarily speedy promotion entirely to the backing of Gorbachev. He, in turn, was to be an influential figure on the reformist wing of the Politburo during the second half of the 1980s.

Other appointments were less successful. Yegor Ligachev, a secretary of the Central Committee who had backed Gorbachev strongly for the leadership, was rapidly elevated to full membership in the Politburo and for a time was de facto second secretary within the leadership. But as early as 1986 it was clear that his reformism was within very strict limits. Already he was objecting to intellectuals reexamining the Soviet past and taking advantage of the new policy of glasnost (openness or transparency) that Gorbachev had enunciated. Successive heads of the KGB and of the Ministry of Defense were still more conservative than Ligachev, and the technocrat, Nikolai Ryzhkov, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, was reluctant to abandon the economic planning system in which, as a factory manager and, subsequently, state official, he had made his career.

Gorbachev embraced the concept of demokratizatsiya (democratization) from the beginning of his General Secretaryship, although the term he used most often was perestroika (reconstruction). Initially, the first of these terms was not intended to be an endorsement of pluralist democracy, but signified rather a liberalization of the system, while perestroika was a useful synonym for reform, since the very term reform had been taboo in Soviet politics for many years. Between 1985 and 1988, however, the scope of these concepts broadened. democratization began to be linked to contested elections. Some local elections with more than one candidate had already taken place before Gorbachev persuaded the Nineteenth Party Conference of the Communist Party during the summer of 1988 to accept competitive elections for a new legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies, to be set up the following year. That decision, which filled many of the regional party officials with well-founded foreboding, was to make the Soviet system different. Even though the elections were not multiparty (the first multiparty elections were in 1993), the electoral campaigns were in many regions and cities keenly contested. It became plain just how wide a spectrum of political views lay behind the monolithic facade the Communist Party had traditionally projected to the outside world and to Soviet citizens.

While glasnost had brought into the open a constituency favorably disposed to such reforms, no such radical departure from Soviet democratic centralism could have occurred without the strong backing of Gorbachev. Up until the last two years of the existence of the Soviet Union the hierarchical nature of the system worked to Gorbachev's advantage, even when he was pursuing policies that were undermining the party hierarchy and, in that sense, his own power base. While there had been a great deal of socioeconomic change during the decades that separated Stalin's death from Gorbachev's coming to power, there was one important institutional continuity that, paradoxically, facilitated reforms that went beyond the wildest dreams of Soviet dissidents and surpassed the worst nightmares of the KGB. That was the power and authority of the general secretaryship of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the post Gorbachev held from March 1985 until the dissolution of the CPSU in August 1991 and which - in particular, for the first four of his six and one-half years at the top of the Soviet political system - made him the principal policy maker within the country. Perestroika, which had originally meant economic restructuring and limited reform, came to stand for transformative change of the Soviet system. Both the ambiguity of the concept and traditional party norms kept many officials from revolting openly against perestroika until it was too late to close the floodgates of change.

A major impetus to Gorbachev's initial reforms had been the long-term decline in the rate of economic growth. Indeed, the closest thing to a consensus in the Soviet Union in 1985 - 1986 was the need to get the country moving again economically. A number of economic reforms introduced by Gorbachev and Ryzhkov succeeded in breaking down the excessive centralization that had been a problem of the unreformed Soviet economic system. For example, the Law on the State Enterprise of 1987 strengthened the authority of factory managers at the expense of economic ministries, but it did nothing to raise the quantity or quality of production. The Enterprise Law fostered inflation, promoted inter-enterprise debt, and facilitated failure to pay taxes to the central budget.

The central budget also suffered severely from one of the earliest policy initiatives supported by Gorbachev and urged upon him by Ligachev. This was the anti-alcohol campaign, which went beyond exhortation and involved concrete measures to limit the production, sale, and distribution of alcohol. By 1988 this policy was being relaxed. In the meantime, it had some measure of success in cutting down the consumption of alcohol. Alcohol-related accidents declined, and some health problems were alleviated. Economically, however, the policy was extremely damaging. The huge profits on which the state had relied from the sale of alcohol, on which it had a monopoly, were cut drastically not only because of a fall in consumption but also because, under conditions of semi-prohibition, moonshine took the place of state-manufactured vodka. Since the launch of perestroika had also coincided with a drop in the world oil price, this was a loss of revenue the state and its political leadership could not afford.

Gorbachev had, early in his general secretaryship, been ready to contemplate market elements within the Soviet economy. By 1989 - 1990 he had increasingly come to believe that market forces should be the main engine of growth. Nevertheless, he favored what he first called a "socialist market economy" and later a "regulated market." He was criticized by market fundamentalists for using the latter term, which they saw as an oxymoron. Although by 1993 Yegor Gaidar, a firm supporter of the market, was observing that "throughout the world the market is regulated." Gorbachev initially endorsed, and then retreated from, a radical but (as its proponents were later to admit) unrealistic policy of moving the Soviet Union to a market economy within five hundred days. The Five-Hundred-Day Plan was drawn up by a group of economists, chosen in equal numbers by Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (the latter by this time a major player in Soviet and Russian politics), during the summer of 1990. In setting up the working group, in consultation with Yeltsin, Gorbachev completely bypassed the Communist Party. He had been elected president of the Soviet Union by the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR in March 1990 and was increasingly relying on his authority in that role. However, the presidency did not have the institutional underpinning that the party apparatus had provided for a General Secretary - until Gorbachev consciously loosened the rungs of the ladder on which he had climbed to the top. Ultimately, in the face of strong opposition from state and party authorities attempting to move to the market in a giant leap, Gorbachev sought a compromise between the views of the market enthusiasts, led by Stanislav Shatalin and Grigory Yavlinsky, and those of the chairman of the Council of Ministers and his principal economic adviser, Leonid Abalkin.

Because radical democrats tended also to be in favor of speedy marketization, Gorbachev's hesitation meant that he lost support in that constituency. People who had seen Gorbachev as the embodiment and driving force of change in and of the Soviet system increasingly in 1990 - 1991 transferred their support to Yeltsin, who in June 1991 was elected president of Russia in a convincing first-round victory. Since he had been directly elected, and Gorbachev indirectly, this gave Yeltsin a greater democratic legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of citizens, even though the very fact that contested elections had been introduced into the Soviet system was Gorbachev's doing. If Gorbachev had taken the risk of calling a general election for the presidency of the Soviet Union a year earlier, rather than taking the safer route of election by the existing legislature, he might have enhanced his popular legitimacy, extended his own period in office, and extended the life of the Soviet Union (although, to the extent that it was democratic, it would have been a smaller union, with the Baltic states as the prime candidates for early exit). In March 1990, the point at which he became Soviet president, Gorbachev was still ahead of Yeltsin in the opinion polls of the most reliable of survey research institutes, the All-Union (subsequently All-Russian) Center for the Study of Public Opinion. It was during the early summer of that year that Yeltsin moved ahead of him.

By positing the interests of Russia against those of the Union, Yeltsin played a major role in making the continuation of a smaller Soviet Union an impossibility. By first liberalizing and then democratizing, Gorbachev had taken the lid off the nationalities problem. Almost every nation in the country had a long list of grievances and, when East European countries achieved full independence during the course of 1989, this emboldened a number of the Soviet nationalities to demand no less. Gorbachev, by this time, was committed to turning the Soviet system into something different - indeed, he was well advanced in the task of dismantling the traditional Soviet edifice - but he strove to keep together a multinational union by attempting to turn a pseudo-federal system into a genuine federation or, as a last resort, a looser confederation.

Gorbachev's major failures were unable to prevent disintegration of the union and not improving economic performance. However, since everything was interconnected in the Soviet Union, it was impossible to introduce political change without raising national consciousness and, in some cases, separatist aspirations. If the disintegration of the Soviet Union is compared with the breakup of Yugoslavia, what is remarkable is the extent to which the Soviet state gave way to fifteen successor states with very little bloodshed. It was also impossible to move smoothly from an economic system based over many decades on one set of principles (a centralized, command economy) to a system based on another set of principles (market relations) without going through a period of disruption in which things were liable to get worse before they got better.

Gorbachev's failures were more than counterbalanced by his achievements. He changed Soviet foreign policy dramatically, reaching important arms control agreements with U.S. president Reagan and establishing good relations with all the Soviet Union's neighbors. Defense policy was subordinated to political objectives, and the underlying philosophy of kto kogo (who will defeat whom) gave way to a belief in interdependence and mutual security. These achievements were widely recognized internationally - most notably with the award to Gorbachev in 1990 of the Nobel Peace Prize. If Gorbachev is faulted in Russia today, it is for being overly idealistic in the conduct of foreign relations, to an extent not fully reciprocated by his Western interlocutors. The Cold War had begun with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. It ended when one East and Central European country after another became independent in 1989 and when Gorbachev accepted the loss of Eastern Europe, something all his predecessors had regarded as non-negotiable. Gorbachev's answer to the charge from domestic hard-liners that he had "surrendered" Eastern Europe was to say: "What did I surrender, and to whom? Poland to the Poles, the Czech lands to the Czechs, Hungary to the Hungarians."

After the failed coup against Gorbachev of August 1991, when he was held under house arrest on the Crimean coast while Yeltsin became the focal point of resistance to the putschists, his political position was greatly weakened. With the hard-liners discredited, disaffected nationalities pressed for full independence, and Yeltsin became increasingly intransigent in pressing Russian interests at the expense of any kind of federal union. In December 1991 the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian republics got together to announce that the Soviet Union was ceasing to exist. Gorbachev bowed to the inevitable and on December 25 resigned from the presidency of a state, the USSR, which then disappeared from the map.

During the post-Soviet period Gorbachev held no position of power, but he continued to be politically active. His relations with Yeltsin were so bad that at one point Yeltsin attempted to prevent him from travelling abroad, but abandoned that policy following protests from Western leaders. Throughout the Yeltsin years, Gorbachev was never invited to the Kremlin, although he was consulted on a number of occasions by Vladimir Putin when he succeeded Yeltsin. Gorbachev's main activities were centered on the foundation he headed, an independent think-tank of social-democratic leanings, which promoted research, seminars, and conferences on developments within the former Soviet Union and on major international issues. Gorbachev became the author of several books, most notably two volumes of memoirs published in Russian in 1995 and, in somewhat abbreviated form, in English and other languages in 1996. Other significant works included a book of political reflections, based on tape-recorded conversations with his Czech friend from university days, Zdenek Mlynár, which appeared in 2002. He became active also on environmental matters as president of the Green Cross International. Domestically, Gorbachev lent his name and energy to an attempt to launch a Social Democratic Party, but with little success. He continued to be admired abroad and gave speeches in many different countries. Indeed, the Gorbachev Foundation depended almost entirely on its income from its president's lecture fees and book royalties.

Gorbachev will, however, be remembered above all for his contribution to six years that changed the world, during which he was the last leader of the USSR. Notwithstanding numerous unintended consequences of perestroika, of which the most regrettable in Gorbachev's eyes, was the breakup of the Union, the long-term changes for the better introduced in the Gorbachev era - and to a significant degree instigated by him - greatly outweigh the failures. Ultimately, Gorbachev's place in history is likely to rest upon his playing the most decisive role in ending the Cold War and on his massive contribution to the blossoming of freedom, in Eastern Europe and Russia itself.

Bibliography

Braithwaite, Rodric. (2002). Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Breslauer, George. (2002). Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Archie, and Shevtsova, Lilia, eds. (2001). Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Chernyaev, Anatoly. (2000). My Six Years with Gorbachev. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1996). Memoirs. New York: Doubleday.

Gorbachev, Mikhail, and Mlynář, Zdeněk. (2001). Conversations with Gorbachev. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985 - 1991. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Ligachev, Yegor. (1993). Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin. New York: Pantheon Books.

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Matlock, Jack F., Jr. (1995). Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House.

Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

—ARCHIE BROWN

The last president of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Although a committed communist, he sought to revive the ailing Soviet economy by introducing some elements of capitalist competition (a policy he called perestroika, or “restructuring”) and to encourage free expression by a policy of glasnost. Perestroika failed to stimulate the economy, while glasnost spurred popular criticism of communism itself and the surfacing of long-repressed nationalism in the republics that composed the Soviet Union. In 1991 hard-line communists, many of them Gorbachev's appointees, staged a coup d'état against him. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, rallied opposition against the coup, which also faced international criticism and aroused only lukewarm support in the Soviet military. The coup quickly collapsed and Gorbachev returned to the presidency, but with such weakened prestige that he was unable to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism.

Quotes:

"Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life."

"The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy."

"The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism."

"Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind."

"My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could."

"I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal."

See more famous quotes by Mikhail Gorbachev

"Gorbachev" redirects here. For other uses, see Gorbachev (disambiguation).

Mikhail Gorbachev Михаил Горбачёв
Gorbachev in 1987
President of the Soviet Union
In office 15 March 1990 – 25 December 1991
Prime Minister	Nikolai Ryzhkov Valentin Pavlov Ivan Silayev
Vice President	Gennady Yanayev
Preceded by	Andrei Gromyko
Succeeded by	Office abolished
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
In office 11 March 1985 – 24 August 1991
Preceded by	Konstantin Chernenko
Succeeded by	Vladimir Ivashko (Acting)
12th Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union
In office 1 October 1988 – 25 May 1989
Prime Minister	Nikolai Tikhonov Nikolai Ryzhkov
1st Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union
In office 25 May 1989 – 15 March 1990
Preceded by	himself as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
Succeeded by	Anatoly Lukyanov as Parliament Speaker himself as Head of State as President of the Soviet Union
Member of Politburo
In office 1980 – 1991
Born	2 March 1931 (1931-03-02) (age 78) Stavropol, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1950–1991) Social Democratic Party of Russia (2001–2004) Union of Social Democrats (2007-present) Independent Democratic Party of Russia (2008-present)
Spouse(s)	Raisa Gorbachyova (d. 1999)
Alma mater	Moscow State University
Profession	Lawyer
Religion	Atheist
Signature

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв, pronounced [mʲɪxɐˈil sʲɪrˈɡʲeɪvʲɪtɕ ɡərbɐˈtɕof]  ( listen); born 2 March 1931) was the second-to-last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991. He was the only Soviet leader to have been born after the October Revolution of 1917.

Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While in college, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of Politburo in 1979. After the deaths, within three years, of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by Politburo in 1985. Already before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.

Gorbachev's attempts at reform as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, ended the political supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

In September 2008 Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia together,^[1] and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent.^[2] This is Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a political party of significance in Russian politics after having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social-Democrats in 2007.^[3]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Marriage and family 3 Rise in the Communist Party 4 General Secretary of the CPSU 4.1 Domestic reforms 4.1.1 Perestroika 4.1.2 Glasnost 4.2 Foreign engagements 4.3 Collapse of the Soviet Union 4.3.1 Crisis of the Union, 1990-91 4.3.2 The August 1991 coup 4.3.3 Aftermath of the coup and the final collapse 5 Activities after resignation 6 Call for global restructuring 7 Honours and accolades 8 Religious affiliation 9 Naevus flammeus 10 See also 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External links

Early life

This section requires expansion.

Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Stavropol, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union into a peasant family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While in college, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it.

Marriage and family

Gorbachev met his future wife Raisa Titarenko at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mihailovna Virganskaya (Ири́на Миха́йловна Вирга́нская), in 1957. Raisa Gorbachev died of leukemia in 1999.^[4]

Rise in the Communist Party

Gorbachev visiting a pig farm in East Germany, 1966

Gorbachev attended the important twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, where Nikita Khrushchev announced a plan to surpass the U.S. in per capita production within twenty years. At this point in his life, Gorbachev would rise in the Communist League hierarchy and worked his way up through territorial leagues of the party. He was promoted to Head of the Department of Party Organs in the Stavropol Agricultural Kraikom in 1963.^[5] In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, a body of the CPSU, becoming one of the youngest provincial party chiefs in the nation.^[5] In this position he helped reorganise the collective farms, improve workers' living conditions, expand the size of their private plots, and give them a greater voice in planning.^[5] He was soon made a member of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1971. Three years later, in 1974, he was made a Representative to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, and Chairman of the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs. He was subsequently appointed to the Central Committee's Secretariat for Agriculture in 1978, replacing Fyodor Kulakov, who had supported Gorbachev's appointment, after Kulakov died of a heart attack.^[5][6] In 1979, Gorbachev was promoted to the Politburo, the highest authority in the country, and received full membership in 1980. Gorbachev owed his steady rise to power to the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, the powerful chief ideologist of the CPSU.^[7]

During Yuri Andropov's tenure as General Secretary (1982–1984), Gorbachev became one of the Poliburo's most visible and active members.^[7] With responsibility over personnel, working together with Andropov, 20 percent of the top echelon of government ministers and regional governors were replaced, often with younger men. During this time Grigory Romanov, Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev were elevated, the latter two working closely with Gorbachev, Ryzhkov on economics, Ligachev on personnel.^{[8][page needed]} Gorbachev's positions within the CPSU created more opportunities to travel abroad and this would profoundly affect his political and social views in the future as leader of the country. In 1972, he headed a Soviet delegation to Belgium,^[5] and three years later he led a delegation to West Germany; in 1983 he headed a delegation to Canada to meet with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of the Commons and Senate. In 1984, he travelled to the United Kingdom, where he met British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Upon Andropov's death in 1984, the aged Konstantin Chernenko took power; after his death the following year, it became clear to the party hierarchy that younger leadership was needed.^[9] Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by Politburo on 11 March 1985, only three hours after Chernenko's death. Upon his accession at age 54, he was the youngest member of Politburo.^[7]

General Secretary of the CPSU

Mikhail Gorbachev became the Party's first leader to have been born after the Revolution. As de facto ruler of the USSR, he tried to reform the stagnating Party and the state economy by introducing glasnost ("openness"), perestroika ("restructuring"), demokratizatsiya ("democratization"), and uskoreniye ("acceleration" of economic development), which were launched at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February 1985.

Domestic reforms

Gorbachev's primary goal as General Secretary was to revive the Soviet economy after the stagnant Brezhnev years.^[7] In 1985, he announced that the Soviet economy was stalled and that reorganization was needed. Gorbachev proposed a "vague programme of reform", which was adopted at the April Plenum of the Central Committee.^[6] He called for increased industrial and agricultural productivity, fast-paced technological modernization, and attempted to reform the Soviet bureaucracy to be more efficient and prosperous.^[7] Gorbachev soon realised that fixing the Soviet economy would be near-impossible without reforming the political and social structure of the Communist nation.^[10] Gorbachev also initiated the concept of gospriyomka ("approval") during his time as leader^[11], which represented state approval of goods in an effort to maintain quality control and combat inferior manufacturing.^[12]

He made a speech in May 1985 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) advocating widespread reforms. The reforms began in personnel changes; the most notable change was the replacement of Andrei Gromyko as Minister of Foreign Affairs with Eduard Shevardnadze. Gromyko, disparaged as "Mr Nyet" in the West, had served for 28 years as Minister of Foreign Affairs and was considered an 'old thinker'. Robert D. English notes that, despite Shevardnadze's diplomatic inexperience, Gorbachev "shared with him an outlook" and experience in managing an agricultural region of the Soviet Union (Georgia), which meant that both had weak links to the powerful military-industrial complex.^[13]

A number of reformist ideas were discussed by Politburo members. One of the first reforms Gorbachev introduced was the anti-alcohol campaign, begun in May 1985, which was designed to fight widespread alcoholism in the Soviet Union. Prices of vodka, wine and beer were raised, and their sales were restricted. It was pursued vigorously and cut both alcohol sales and government revenue.^[14] It was a serious blow to the state budget–a loss of approximately 100 billion rubles according to Alexander Yakovlev–after alcohol production migrated to the black market economy. The program proved to be a useful symbol for change in the country, however.^[14] The reduction in sales greatly expanded the purchasing power of the Soviet citizens, as alcohol was very expensive.^[14]

Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate in 1986 during a visit to East Germany

Perestroika

Gorbachev with Erich Honecker, GDR.

Meeting with Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu

Gorbachev & George H. W. Bush - 1990

Gorbachev initiated his new policy of perestroika and its attendant radical reforms in 1986; they were sketched, but not fully spelled out, at the XXVIIth Party Congress in February-March 1986. The new policy of "reconstruction" was introduced in an attempt to overcome the economic stagnation by creating a dependable and effective mechanism for accelerating economic and social progress.^[15] According to Gorbachev, perestroika was the "conference of development of democracy, socialist self-government, encouragement of initiative and creative endeavor, improved order and disciple, more glasnost, criticism and self-criticism in all spheres of our society. It is utmost respect for the individual and consideration for personal dignity."^[15]

Domestic changes continued apace. In a bombshell speech during Armenian SSR's Central Committee Plenum of the Communist Party the young First Secretary of Armenia's Hrazdan Regional Communist Party, Hayk Kotanjian, criticised rampant corruption in the Armenian Communist Party's highest echelons, implicating Armenian SSR Communist Party First Secretary Karen Demirchyan and calling for his resignation. Symbolically, intellectual Andrei Sakharov was invited to return to Moscow by Gorbachev in December 1986 after six years of internal exile in Gorky. During the same month, however, signs of the nationalities problem that would haunt the later years of the Soviet Union surfaced as riots, named Jeltoqsan, occurred in Kazakhstan after Dinmukhamed Kunayev was replaced as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan.

The Central Committee Plenum in January 1987 would see the crystallisation of Gorbachev's political reforms, including proposals for multi-candidate elections and the appointment of non-Party members to government positions. He also first raised the idea of expanding co-operatives at the plenum. Economic reforms took up much of the rest of 1987, as a new law giving enterprises more independence was passed in June and Gorbachev released a book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, in November, elucidating his main ideas for reform. In 1987 he rehabilitated many opponents of Stalin, another part of the De-Stalinization, which began in 1956, when Lenin's Testament was published.

Glasnost

1988 would see Gorbachev's introduction of glasnost, which gave new freedoms to the people, including greater freedom of speech. This was a radical change, as control of speech and suppression of government criticism had previously been a central part of the Soviet system. The press became far less controlled, and thousands of political prisoners and many dissidents were released. Gorbachev's goal in undertaking glasnost was to pressure conservatives within the CPSU who opposed his policies of economic restructuring, and he also hoped that through different ranges of openness, debate and participation, the Soviet people would support his reform initiatives. At the same time, he opened himself and his reforms up for more public criticism, evident in Nina Andreyeva's critical letter in a March edition of Sovetskaya Rossiya.^[6] Gorbachev acknowledged that his liberalising policies of glasnost and perestroika owed a great deal to Alexander Dubček's "Socialism with a human face".

The Law on Cooperatives enacted in May 1988 was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev era. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the service, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. The law initially imposed high taxes and employment restrictions, although these were ignored by some SSRs. Later the restrictions were revised to avoid discouraging private-sector activity. Under the provision for private ownership, cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers became part of the Soviet scene. Under the new law, the restructuring of large 'All-Union' industrial organisations also began. Aeroflot, was split up eventually becoming several independent airlines. These newly autonomous business organisations were encouraged to seek foreign investment.

In June 1988, at the CPSU's Party Conference, Gorbachev launched radical reforms meant to reduce party control of the government apparatus. He proposed a new executive in the form of a presidential system, as well as a new legislative element, to be called the Congress of People's Deputies.^[6] Elections to the Congress of People's Deputies were held throughout the Soviet Union in March and April 1989. This was the first free election in the Soviet Union since 1917. Gorbachev became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (or head of state) on 25 May 1989. On 15 March 1990, Gorbachev was elected as the first executive President of the Soviet Union^[6] with 59% of the Deputies' votes being an unopposed candidate. The Congress met for the first time on 25 May in order to elect representatives from Congress to sit on the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the Congress posed problems for Gorbachev; its sessions were televised, airing more criticism and encouraging people to expect ever more rapid reform. In the elections, many Party candidates were defeated. Furthermore, Boris Yeltsin was elected in Moscow and returned to political prominence to become an increasingly vocal critic of Gorbachev.^[6]

Foreign engagements

In contrast to his controversial domestic reforms, Gorbachev was largely hailed in the West for his 'New Thinking' in foreign affairs. During his tenure, he sought to improve relations and trade with the West by reducing Cold War tensions. He established close relationships with several Western leaders, such as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - who famously remarked: "I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together".^[16]

Gorbachev understood the link between achieving international détente and domestic reform and thus began extending 'New Thinking' abroad immediately. On 8 April 1985, he announced the suspension of the deployment of SS-20s in Europe as a move towards resolving intermediate-range nuclear weapons (INF) issues. Later that year, in September, Gorbachev proposed that the Soviets and Americans both cut their nuclear arsenals in half. He went to France on his first trip abroad as Soviet leader in October. November saw the Geneva Summit between Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Though no concrete agreement was made, Gorbachev and Reagan struck a personal relationship and decided to hold further meetings.^[6]

January 1986 would see Gorbachev make his boldest international move so far, when he announced his proposal for the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe and his strategy for eliminating all nuclear weapons by the year 2000 (often referred to as the 'January Proposal'). He also began the process of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Mongolia on 28 July.^[6] Nonetheless, many observers, such as Jack F. Matlock Jr. (despite generally praising Gorbachev as well as Reagan), have criticised Gorbachev for taking too long to achieve withdrawal from the Afghanistan War, citing it as an example of lingering elements of 'old thinking' in Gorbachev.^[17]

On 11 October 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Reykjavík, Iceland to discuss reducing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. To the immense surprise of both men's advisers, the two agreed in principle to removing INF systems from Europe and to equal global limits of 100 INF missile warheads. They also essentially agreed in principle to eliminate all nuclear weapons in 10 years (by 1996), instead of by the year 2000 as in Gorbachev's original outline.^[17] Continuing trust issues, particularly over reciprocity and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), meant that the summit is often regarded as a failure for not producing a concrete agreement immediately, or for leading to a staged elimination of nuclear weapons. In the long term, nevertheless, this would culminate in the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987, after Gorbachev had proposed this elimination on 22 July 1987 (and it was subsequently agreed on in Geneva on 24 November).^[6]

In February, 1988, Gorbachev announced the full withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was completed the following year, although the civil war continued as the Mujahedin pushed to overthrow the pro-Soviet Najibullah regime. An estimated 28,000 Soviets were killed between 1979 and 1989 as a result of the Afghanistan War.

Gorbachev in one-on-one discussions with Reagan

Also during 1988, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine, and allow the Eastern bloc nations to freely determine their own internal affairs. Jokingly dubbed the "Sinatra Doctrine" by Gorbachev's Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, this policy of non-intervention in the affairs of the other Warsaw Pact states proved to be the most momentous of Gorbachev's foreign policy reforms. In his 6 July 1989 speech arguing for a "common European home" before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, Gorbachev declared: "The social and political order in some countries changed in the past, and it can change in the future too, but this is entirely a matter for each people to decide. Any interference in the internal affairs, or any attempt to limit the sovereignty of another state, friend, ally, or another, would be inadmissible."

Moscow's abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine led to a string of counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe throughout 1989, in which Communism was overthrown. By the end of 1989, revolts had spread from one Eastern European capital to another, ousting the regimes built on Eastern Europe after World War II. With the exception of Romania, the popular upheavals against the pro-Soviet Communist regimes were all peaceful ones. (See Revolutions of 1989) The loosening of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe effectively ended the Cold War, and for this, Gorbachev was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold in 1989 and the Nobel Peace Prize on 15 October 1990.

The rest of 1989 was taken up by the increasingly problematic nationalities question and the dramatic collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Despite international détente reaching unprecedented levels, with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan completed in January and U.S.-Soviet talks continuing between Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, domestic reforms were suffering from increasing divergence between reformists, who criticised the pace of change, and conservatives, who criticised the extent of change. Gorbachev states that he tried to find the middle ground between both groups, but this would draw more criticism towards him.^[6] The story from this point on moves away from reforms and becomes one of the nationalities question and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

On 9 November, people in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, GDR) broke down the Berlin Wall after a peaceful protest against the country's dictatorial administration, including a demonstration by some one million people in East Berlin on 4 November. Unlike earlier riots which were ended by military force with the help of USSR, Gorbachev, who came to be lovingly called "Gorby" in West Germany, now decided not to interfere with the process in Germany.^[18] He stated that German reunification was an internal German matter.

Coit D. Blacker wrote in 1990 that the Soviet leadership "appeared to have believed that whatever loss of authority the Soviet Union might suffer in Eastern Europe would be more than offset by a net increase in its influence in Western Europe."^[19] Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Gorbachev ever intended for the complete dismantling of Communism in the Warsaw Pact countries. Rather, Gorbachev assumed that the Communist parties of Eastern Europe could be reformed in a similar way to the reforms he hoped to achieve in the CPSU. Just as perestroika was aimed at making the USSR more efficient economically and politically, Gorbachev believed that the Comecon and Warsaw Pact could be reformed into more effective entities. Alexander Yakovlev, a close advisor to Gorbachev, would later state that it would have been "absurd to keep the system" in Eastern Europe. In contrast to Gorbachev, Yakovlev had come to the conclusion that the Soviet-dominated Comecon was inherently unworkable and that the Warsaw Pact had "no relevance to real life."^[20]

Collapse of the Soviet Union

Main article: Collapse of the Soviet Union

While Gorbachev's political initiatives were positive for freedom and democracy in the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies, the economic policy of his government gradually brought the country close to disaster. By the end of the 1980s, severe shortages of basic food supplies (meat, sugar) led to the reintroduction of the war-time system of distribution using food cards that limited each citizen to a certain amount of product per month. Compared to 1985, the state deficit grew from 0 to 109 billion rubles; gold funds decreased from 2,000 to 200 tons; and external debt grew from 0 to 120 billion dollars.

Furthermore, the democratisation of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had irreparably undermined the power of the CPSU and Gorbachev himself. The relaxation of censorship and attempts to create more political openness had the unintended effect of re-awakening long-suppressed nationalist and anti-Russian feelings in the Soviet republics. Calls for greater independence from Moscow's rule grew louder, especially in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia which had been annexed into the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1940. Nationalist feeling also took hold in Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In December 1986, the first signs of the nationalities problem that would haunt the later years of the Soviet Union's existence surfaced as riots, named Jeltoqsan, occurred in Alma Ata and other areas of Kazakhstan after Dinmukhamed Kunayev was replaced as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. Nationalism would then surface in Russia in May 1987, as 600 members of Pamyat, a nascent Russian nationalist group, demonstrated in Moscow and were becoming increasingly linked to Boris Yeltsin, who received their representatives at a meeting.^[6]

Glasnost hastened awareness of the national sovereignty problem. The free flow of information had been so completely suppressed for so long in the Soviet Union that many of the ruling class had all but forgotten that the Soviet Union was an empire conquered through military force and consolidated by the persecution of millions of people, and not a union voluntarily entered into by local populations. Thus, the extremity of local desire for independent control of their own affairs took these leaders by surprise, and the leaders were unprepared for the depth of the long pent-up feelings that were released.

Violence erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh - an Armenian-populated enclave within Azerbaijan - between February and April, when Armenians living in the area began a new wave of protests over the arbitrary transfer of the historically Armenian region from Armenia to Azerbaijan in 1920 upon Joseph Stalin's decision.^[21] Gorbachev imposed a temporary solution, but it did not last, as fresh trouble arose in Nagorno-Karabakh between June and July. Turmoil would once again return in late 1988, this time in Armenia itself, when the Leninakan Earthquake hit the region on 7 December. Poor local infrastructure magnified the hazard and some 25,000 people died.^[6] Gorbachev was forced to break off his trip to the U.S. and cancel planned travels to Cuba and Britain.^[6]

In March and April 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies took place throughout the Soviet Union. This returned many pro-independence republicans, as many CPSU candidates were rejected. The televised Congress debates allowed the dissemination of pro-independence propositions. Indeed, 1989 would see numerous nationalistic expressions protests. Initiated by the Baltic republics in January, laws were passed in most non-Russian republics giving precedence for the republican language over Russian. 9 April would see the crackdown of nationalist demonstrations by Soviet troops in Tbilisi. There would be further bloody protests in Uzbekistan in June, where Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks clashed in Fergana. Apart from this violence, three major events that altered the face of the nationalities issue occurred in 1989. Estonia had declared its sovereignty in November, 1988, to be followed by Lithuania in May 1989 and by Latvia in July (the Communist Party of Lithuania would also declare its independence from the CPSU in December). This brought the Union and the republics into clear confrontation and would form a precedent for other republics.

Following this, in July, on the eve of the anniversary of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, it was formally revealed that the treaty did indeed include a plan for the annexation of the Baltic countries into the USSR (as happened in 1940) and the division of Poland between the two countries. The unsavory past was exposed and gave impetus to the peoples of the Baltic countries who could now even more legitimately claim that they were subject to oppression. Finally, the Eastern bloc collapsed in the autumn of 1989, raising hopes that Gorbachev would extend his non-interventionist doctrine to the internal workings of the USSR.^[6]

Crisis of the Union, 1990-91

Gorbachev in 1990

1990 began with nationalist turmoil in January. Azerbaijanis rioted and troops were sent in to restore order; many Moldavians demonstrated in favour of unification with the post-Communist Romania; and Lithuanian demonstrations continued. The same month, in a hugely significant move, Armenia asserted its right to veto laws coming from the All-Union level, thus intensifying the 'war of laws' between republics and Moscow.^[6]

Soon after, the CPSU, which had already lost much of its control, began to lose even more power as Gorbachev deepened political reform. The February Central Committee Plenum advocated multi-party elections; local elections held between February and March returned a large number of pro-independence candidates. The Congress of People's Deputies then amended the Soviet Constitution in March, removing Article 6, which guaranteed the monopoly of the CPSU. The process of political reform was therefore coming from above and below, and was gaining a momentum that would augment republican nationalism. Soon after the constitutional amendment, Lithuania declared independence and elected Vytautas Landsbergis as President.^[6]

On 15 March, Gorbachev himself was elected as the only President of the Soviet Union by the Congress of People's Deputies and chose a Presidential Council of 15 politicians. Gorbachev was essentially creating his own political support base independent of CPSU conservatives and radical reformers. The new Executive was designed to be a powerful position to guide the spiraling reform process, and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Congress of People's Deputies had already given Gorbachev increasingly presidential powers in February. This would be again a source of criticism from reformers. Despite the apparent increase in Gorbachev's power, he was unable to stop the process of nationalistic assertion. Further embarrassing facts about Soviet history were revealed in April, when the government admitted that the NKVD had carried out the infamous Katyn Massacre of Polish army officers during World War II; previously, the USSR had blamed Nazi Germany. More significantly for Gorbachev's position, Boris Yeltsin was reaching a new level of prominence, as he was elected Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR in May, effectively making him the de jure leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Problems for Gorbachev would once more come from the Russian parliament in June, when it declared the precedence of Russian laws over All-Union level legislation.^[6]

Gorbachev's personal position continued changing. At XXVIIIth CPSU Congress in July, Gorbachev was re-elected General Secretary but this position was now completely independent of Soviet government, and the Politburo had no say in the ruling of the country. Gorbachev further reduced Party power in the same month, when he issued a decree abolishing Party control of all areas of the media and broadcasting. At the same time, Gorbachev was working to consolidate his Presidential position, culminating in the Supreme Soviet granting him special powers to rule by decree in September in order to pass a much-needed plan for transition to a market economy. However, the Supreme Soviet could not agree on which programme to adopt. Gorbachev pressed on with political reform, his proposal for setting up a new Soviet government, with a Soviet of the Federation consisting of representatives from all 15 republics, was passed through the Supreme Soviet in November. In December, Gorbachev was once more granted increased executive power by the Supreme Soviet, arguing that such moves were necessary to counter "the dark forces of nationalism". Such moves led to Eduard Shevardnadze's resignation; Gorbachev's former ally warned of an impending dictatorship. This move was a serious blow to Gorbachev personally and to his efforts for reform.^[6]

Meanwhile, Gorbachev was losing further ground to nationalists. October 1990 saw the founding of DemoRossiya, the Russian nationalist party; a few days later, both Ukraine and Russia declared their laws completely sovereign over Soviet level laws. The 'war of laws' had become an open battle, with the Supreme Soviet refusing to recognise the actions of the two republics. Gorbachev would publish the draft of a new union treaty in November, which envisioned a continued union called the Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, but, going into 1991, the actions of Gorbachev were steadily being overtaken by the centrifugal secessionist forces.^[6]

January and February would see a new level of turmoil in the Baltic republics. On 10 January 1991 Gorbachev issued an ultimatum-like request addressing the Lithuanian Supreme Council demanding the restoration of the validity of the constitution of the Soviet Union in Lithuania and the revoking of all anti-constitutional laws. In his Memoirs, Gorbachev asserts that, on 12 January, he convened the Council of the Federation and political measures to prevent bloodshed were agreed, including sending representatives of the Council of the Federation on a "fact-finding mission" to Vilnius. However, before the delegation arrived, the local branches of the KGB and armed forces had worked together to seize the TV tower in Vilnius; Gorbachev asked the heads of the KGB and military if they had approved such action, and there is no evidence that they, or Gorbachev, ever approved this move. Gorbachev cites documents found in the RSFSR Prokuratura after the August coup, which only mentioned that "some 'authorities'" had sanctioned the actions.^[6] A book called Alpha – the KGB's Top Secret Unit also suggests that a "KGB operation co-ordinated with the military" was undertaken by the KGB Alpha Group.^[22] Archie Brown, in The Gorbachev Factor, uses the memoirs of many people around Gorbachev and in the upper echelons of the Soviet political landscape, to implicate General Valentin Varennikov, a member of the August coup plotters, and General Viktor Achalov, another August coup conspirator. These persons were characterised as individuals "who were prepared to remove Gorbachev from his presidential office unconstitutionally" and "were more than capable of using unauthorised violence against nationalist separatists some months earlier". Brown criticises Gorbachev for "a conscious tilt in the direction of the conservative forces he was trying to keep within an increasingly fragile coalition" who would later betray him; he also criticises Gorbachev "for his tougher line and heightened rhetoric against the Lithuanians in the days preceding the attack and for his slowness in condemning the killings" but notes that Gorbachev did not approve any action and was seeking political solutions.^[23]

As a result of continued violence, at least 14 civilians were killed and more than 600 injured from 11-13 January 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The strong Western reaction and the actions of Russian democratic forces put the president and government of the Soviet Union into an awkward situation, as news of support for Lithuanians from Western democracies started to appear. Further problems surfaced in Riga, Latvia, on 20 January and 21, where OMON (special Ministry of the Interior) troops killed 4 people. Archie Brown suggests that Gorbachev's response this time was better, condemning the rogue action, sending his condolences and suggesting that secession could take place if it went through the procedures outlined in the Soviet constitution. According to Gorbachev's aide, Shakhnazarov (quoted by Archie Brown), Gorbachev was finally beginning to accept the inevitability of "losing" the Baltic republics, although he would try all political means to preserve the Union. Brown believes that this put him in "imminent danger" of being overthrown by hard-liners against the secession.^[23]

Gorbachev thus continued to draw up a new treaty of union which would have created a truly voluntary federation in an increasingly democratised Soviet Union. The new treaty was strongly supported by the Central Asian republics, who needed the economic power and markets of the Soviet Union to prosper. However, the more radical reformists, such as Russian SFSR President Boris Yeltsin, were increasingly convinced that a rapid transition to a market economy was required and were more than happy to contemplate the disintegration of the Soviet Union if that was required to achieve their aims. Nevertheless, a referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held in March (with a referendum in Russia on the creation of a presidency), which returned an average of 76.4% in the 9 republics where it was taken, with a turn-out of 80% of the adult population.^[23] Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova did not participate. Following this, an April meeting at Novo-Ogarevo between Gorbachev and the heads of the 9 republics issued a statement on speeding up the creation of a new Union treaty. Meanwhile, on 12 June 1991 Boris Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Federation by 57.3% of the vote (with a turnout of 74%).^[6]

The August 1991 coup

Main article: Soviet coup attempt of 1991

In contrast to the reformers' moderate approach to the new treaty, the hard-line apparatchiks, still strong within the CPSU and military establishment, were completely opposed to anything which might lead to the break-up of the Soviet Union. On the eve of the treaty's signing, the hardliners struck.

Hardliners in the Soviet leadership, calling themselves the 'State Emergency Committee', launched the August coup in 1991 in an attempt to remove Gorbachev from power and prevent the signing of the new union treaty. During this time, Gorbachev spent three days (19, 20 and 21 August) under house arrest at a dacha in the Crimea before being freed and restored to power. However, upon his return, Gorbachev found that neither union nor Russian power structures heeded his commands as support had swung over to Yeltsin, whose defiance had led to the coup's collapse. Furthermore, Gorbachev was forced to fire large numbers of his Politburo and, in several cases, arrest them. Those arrested for high treason included the "Gang of Eight" that had led the coup, including Kryuchkov, Yazov, Pavlov and Yanayev. Pugo was found shot; and Akhromeyev, who had offered his assistance but was never implicated, was found hanging in his Kremlin office. Most of these men had been former allies of Gorbachev's or promoted by him, which drew fresh criticism.

Aftermath of the coup and the final collapse

Between 21 August and 22 September, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, and Turkmenistan declared their independence. Simultaneously, Boris Yeltsin ordered the CPSU to suspend its activities on the territory of Russia and closed the Central Committee building at Staraya Ploschad. The Russian flag now flew beside the Soviet flag at the Kremlin. In light of these circumstances, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the CPSU on 24 August and advised the Central Committee to dissolve. Gorbachev's hopes of a new Union were further hit when the Congress of People's Deputies dissolved itself on 5 September. Though Gorbachev and the representatives of 8 republics (excluding Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) signed an agreement on forming a new economic community on 18 October, events were overtaking Gorbachev.^[6]

With the country in a rapid state of deterioration, the final blow to Gorbachev's vision was effectively dealt by a Ukrainian referendum on 1 December, where the Ukrainian people voted for independence. The presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met in Belovezh Forest, near Brest, Belarus, on 8 December, founding the Commonwealth of Independent States and declaring the end of the Soviet Union in the Belavezha Accords. Gorbachev was presented with a fait accompli and reluctantly agreed with Yeltsin, on 17 December, to dissolve the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved the next day. Two days later, on 27 December, Yeltsin moved into Gorbachev's old office.^[6]

Gorbachev had aimed to maintain the CPSU as a united party but move it in the direction of social democracy. But when the CPSU was proscribed after the August coup, Gorbachev was left with no effective power base beyond the armed forces.

Activities after resignation

Gorbachev (left) with former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the funeral of Ronald Reagan, 11 June 2004

Following his resignation and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev remained active in Russian politics. Especially during the early years of the post-Soviet era, he expressed criticism at the reforms carried out by Russian president Boris Yeltsin. When president Yeltsin called a referendum for 25 April 1993 in an attempt to achieve even greater powers as president, Gorbachev did not vote, and instead called for new presidential elections to happen soon.^[24]

Following a failed run for the presidency in 1996, Gorbachev established the Social Democratic Party of Russia, a union between several Russian social democratic parties. He resigned as party leader in May 2004 over a disagreement with the party's chairman over the direction taken in the December 2003 election campaign. The party was later banned in 2007 by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation due to its failure to establish local offices with at least 500 members in the majority of Russian regions, which is required by Russian law for a political organisation to be listed as party.^[25] Later that year, Gorbachev founded a new political party, called the Union of Social-Democrats.^[3] In June 2004, Gorbachev represented Russia at the funeral of Ronald Reagan.

Gorbachev has also appeared in numerous media events since his resignation from office. In 1993, Gorbachev appeared as himself in the Wim Wenders film, Faraway, So Close!, the sequel to Wings of Desire. In 1997, Gorbachev appeared with his granddaughter Anastasia in an internationally-screened television commercial for Pizza Hut. The US corporation's fee for the 60-second ad went to his not-for-profit Gorbachev Foundation.^[26] In 2007, French luxury brand Louis Vuitton announced that Gorbachev would be shown in an ad campaign for their signature luggage.

On June 16, 2009, Gorbachev announced that he had recorded an album of old Russian romantic ballads entitled Songs for Raisa to raise money for a charity dedicated to his late wife. On the album, he sings the songs himself accompanied by Russian musician Andrei Makarevich.^[27]

Since his resignation, Gorbachev has remained involved in world affairs. He founded the Gorbachev Foundation in 1992, headquartered in San Francisco, California. He later founded Green Cross International, with which he was one of three major sponsors of the Earth Charter. He also became a member of the Club of Rome and the Club of Madrid.

In the decade that followed the Cold War, Gorbachev opposed both the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the U.S.-led Iraq War in 2003. On 27 July 2007, Gorbachev criticised U.S. foreign policy: “What has followed are unilateral actions, what has followed are wars, what has followed is ignoring the U.N. Security Council, ignoring international law and ignoring the will of the people, even the American people,” he said.^[28] That same year, he visited New Orleans, Louisiana, a spot hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina, and promised to that he would return in 2011 to personally lead a local revolution if the U.S. government had not repaired the levees by that time. He said that revolutionary action should be a last resort.^[29]

With reference to the 2008 South Ossetia war, in an 12 August 2008 op-ed in The Washington Post,^[30] Gorbachev criticized the U.S. support for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and for moving to bring Caucasus into the sphere of its "national interest." He later said the following:

Russia did not want this crisis. The Russian leadership is in a strong enough position domestically; it did not need a little victorious war. Russia was dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili... The decision by the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, to now cease hostilities was the right move by a responsible leader. The Russian president acted calmly, confidently and firmly... The planners of this campaign clearly wanted to make sure that, whatever the outcome, Russia would be blamed for worsening the situation. The West then mounted a propaganda attack against Russia, with the American news media leading the way."^[31]

In September 2008 Gorbachev announced he is going to make a comeback to the Russian politics along with a former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev.^[32] Their party is known as the Independent Democratic Party of Russia. He also is part owner of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.^[33]

Gorbachev (right) being introduced to Barack Obama by Joe Biden, 20 March 2009

On 20 March 2009, Gorbachev met with United States President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in efforts to "reset" strained relations between Russia and the United States.^[34]

On 27 March 2009, Gorbachev visited Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois which is the alma mater of former president Ronald Reagan. He toured the campus and later traveled to Peoria, Illinois as the keynote speaker at the Reagan Day Dinner.^[35]

Call for global restructuring

Gorbachev calls for a kind of perestroika or restructuring of societies around the world, starting in particular with that of the United States, because he is of the view that the economic crisis of 2007-present shows that the Washington consensus economic model is a failure that will sooner or later have to be replaced. According to Gorbachev, countries such as Brazil, Malaysia and China which rejected the Washington consensus and the International Monetary Fund approach to economic development, have done far better economically on the whole and achieved far more fair results for the average citizen, than countries that accepted it. ^[36]

Honours and accolades

Former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan awards Gorbachev the first ever Ronald Reagan Freedom Award at the Reagan Library, 1992

• In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community."^[37]

• On 4 May 1992, Gorbachev was awarded the first ever Ronald Reagan Freedom Award at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.^[38]

• In 1993 Gorbachev was awarded a Legum Doctor, honoris causa from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He was also given an honorary degree from The University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

• Gorbachev was the 1994 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for improving world order, awarded by the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.

• In 1995, Gorbachev received an Honorary Doctorate from Durham University, County Durham, England for his contribution to "the cause of political tolerance and an end to Cold War-style confrontation".^[39]

• For his historic role in the evolution of glasnost, and for his leadership in the disarmament negotiations with the United States during the Reagan administration, Gorbachev was awarded the Courage of Conscience award 20 October 1996.^[40]

• Gorbachev, together with Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren, were awarded the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for their recording of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

• In 2005, Gorbachev was awarded the Point Alpha Prize for his role in supporting German reunification. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Münster.^[41]

Religious affiliation

Gorbachev was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church as a child. He campaigned for establishment of freedom of religion laws in the former Soviet Union.

Remarks by Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan in discussions during their summits, made the U.S. President deeply intrigued by the possibility that the leader of the Evil Empire might be a "closet Christian." Reagan seems to have seen this as the most interesting aspect of his meeting with the Soviet leader in Geneva.^[42]

At the end of a November 1996 interview on CSPAN's Booknotes, Gorbachev described his plans for future books. He made the following reference to God: "I don't know how many years God will be giving me, [or] what His plans are."

In 2005, he said that Pope John Paul II's "devotion to his followers is a remarkable example to all of us" following the pontiff's death. "What can I say -- it must have been the will of God. He acted really courageously."^[43] In a 1989 meeting, he had told him "We appreciate your mission on this high pulpit, we are convinced that it will leave a great mark on history." ^[44] On the other hand, some have alleged that Gorbachev signed a contract killing against Pope John Paul II back in 1979, which resulted in a failed assassination attempt. ^[45] However, he has categorically denied this accusation. ^[46]

Gorbachev was the recipient of the Athenagoras Humanitarian Award of the Order of St. Andrew Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on 20 November 2005.^[47]

On 19 March 2008, during a surprise visit to pray at the tomb of Saint Francis in Assisi, Italy, Gorbachev made an announcement which has been interpreted to the effect that he was a Christian. Gorbachev stated that "St Francis is, for me, the alter Christus, the other Christ. His story fascinates me and has played a fundamental role in my life." He added, "It was through St Francis that I arrived at the Church, so it was important that I came to visit his tomb."^[48]

However, a few days later, he reportedly told the Russian news agency Interfax, "Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies—I can't use any other word—about my secret Catholicism, [...] To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist."^[49] In response, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox patriarch Alexei II told the Russian media: "In Italy, he (Gorbachev) spoke in emotional terms, rather than in terms of faith. He is still on his way to Christianity. If he arrives, we will welcome him."^[49]

Naevus flammeus

Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev is one of the most famous people in modern times with visible naevus flammeus. The crimson birthmark on the top of his bald head was the source of much satire among critics and cartoonists. Contrary to some accounts, it is not rosacea. In his official photos as a Politburo member this birthmark was removed.

Though some suggested that it be surgically removed, Gorbachev opted not to, as once he was publicly known to have the mark, he believed it would be perceived as his being more concerned with his appearance than other more important issues.^[50]

See also

• Black January – Soviet massacre of Azeris in 1990
• Earth Charter
• Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, key Gorbachev advisor and ally
• Sergei M. Plekhanov, other former Gorbachev advisor on the United States and Canada.

References

1. ^ Gray, Sadie (2008-09-30). "Gorbachev launches political party with Russian billionaire". guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/30/russia. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
2. ^ "Mikhail Gorbachev will found new political party". mosnews.com. 2009-05-13. http://mosnews.com/politics/2009/05/13/gorbiedem/. Retrieved 2009-06-13. 
3. ^ ^{a b} "Gorbachev sets up Russia movement". BBC News. 20 October 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7054274.stm. Retrieved 20 October 2007. 
4. ^ Raisa Gorbachyova's Biography on the Gorbachyov Foundation website
5. ^ ^{a b c d e} Current Biography, 1985. New York: The H. W. Wilson Co.. 1985. 
6. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w} Gorbachev, M. S., Memoirs, 1996 (London: Bantam Books)
7. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Mikhail Gorbachev". Encyclopedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/nobelprize/article-9037405. Retrieved 2 April 2009. 
8. ^ Roxburgh, Angus (1991). The Second Russian Revolution: The Struggle for Power in the Kremlin. London: BBC Books. 
9. ^ "Mikhail Gorbachev Biography: Glasnost, Perestroika, and Leadership". American Academy of Achievement. 1 February 2005. http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0bio-1. Retrieved 2 April 2009. 
10. ^ "Михаил Сергеевич Горбачёв (Mikhail Sergeyevičh Gorbačhëv)". Archontology.org. 27 March 2009. http://www.archontology.org/nations/ussr/ussr_state/gorbachev.php. Retrieved 2009-04-03. 
11. ^ Chiesa, Giulietto, 1991, Time of change: an insider's view of Russia's transformation, I.B.Tauris, pp.30.
12. ^ Hosking, By Geoffrey A., 1991, The awakening of the Soviet Union, Harvard University Press, pp.139.
13. ^ English, R., D, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War, 2000 (Columbia University Press)
14. ^ ^{a b c} Hough, Jerry F. (1997), pp. 124-125
15. ^ ^{a b} Kishlansky, Mark (2001), p. 322
16. ^ "Gorbachev becomes Soviet leader". BBC News. March 1985. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/11/newsid_2538000/2538327.stm. Retrieved 22 May 2006. 
17. ^ ^{a b} Matlock, J. F. Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended, 2004
18. ^ "Reuters, Moscow could have started WW3 over Berlin Wall: Gorbachev by Guy Faulconbridge". www.reuters.com. 3 November 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE5A23TB20091103. Retrieved 2009-7-11. 
19. ^ Coit D. Blacker. "The Collapse of Soviet Power in Europe." Foreign Affairs. 1990.
20. ^ Steele, Jonathan. Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy. Boston: Faber, 1994.
21. ^ "CIA – The World Factbook -- Armenia". https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/am.html. Retrieved 27 January 2007. 
22. ^ Boltunov, M., Alfa – Sverkhsekretnyi Otryad KGB [Alpha – The KGB's Top-Secret Unit], 1992, (Moscow: Kedr)
23. ^ ^{a b c} Brown, A., The Gorbachev Factor, 1996, (New York: Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-19-288052-7
24. ^ Maurizio Giuliano, Müssen schnell wählen (interview), Profil, nr. 19, 10 May 1993, page 61
25. ^ Mosnews.com
26. ^ Mikhail Gorbachev appears in Pizza Hut advertising campaign, PRNewswire, 23 December 1997.Retrieved on 3 August 2007.
27. ^ Odynova, Alexandra (2009-06-19). "Former Soviet Leader Gorbachev Records Album". The Saint Petersburg Times. http://www.sptimesrussia.com/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=29283. Retrieved 2009-06-20. 
28. ^ "Gorbachev says U.S. is sowing world ‘disorder’". MSNBC. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19994563/. Retrieved 4 August 2007. 
29. ^ "Gorbachev Vows Revolution If New Orleans Levees Don't Improve". The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/10/09/gorbachev-vows-revolution_n_67679.html. Retrieved 14 September 2007. 
30. ^ "A Path to Peace in the Caucasus". Washington Post. 12 August 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081101372.html. Retrieved 12 August 2008. 
31. ^ Russia Never Wanted a War
32. ^ Mikhail Gorbachev returns to Russian politics
33. ^ Лебедев и Горбачев стали совладельцами "Новой газеты" Grani.ru 7 June 2006
34. ^ http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090323/pl_afp/usrussiadiplomacyobamagorbachev_20090323215234 Retrieved on 24 March 2009.
35. ^ http://www.week.com/news/local/42019457.html Retrieved on 24 March 2009.
36. ^ Washington Post, June 7, 2009, "We Had Our Perestroika. It's High Time for Yours" Op-ed piece by Mikhail Gorbachev
37. ^ The Nobel Peace Prize 1990
38. ^ Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library
39. ^ Honorary Doctorate from Durham
40. ^ The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Recipients List
41. ^ "Reunification Politicians Accept Prize". Deutsche Welle. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1619484,00.html. Retrieved 22 May 2006. 
42. ^ Red Herring: Mikhail Gorbachev's Not-Quite Conversion Christianity Today (Web-only) 4 April 2008, Vol. 52.
43. ^ Gorbachev: Pope was 'example to all of us'
44. ^ Record of Conversation between M.S. Gorbachev and John Paul II
45. ^ Gorbachev signed JP II KGB death warrant
46. ^ Gorbachev denies ordering Pope's assassination
47. ^ Athenagoras humanitarian award to Nobel peace prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev Website of Gorbachev Foundation
48. ^ "Mikhail Gorbachev admits he is a Christian". The Daily Telegraph. 19 March 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/19/wgorbachev119.xml. Retrieved 24 March 2008. 
49. ^ ^{a b} "Gorbachev a closet Christian?". Chicago Tribune. 23 March 2008. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-out_there_gorbachev_rodriguez_23mar24,1,4698255.story. Retrieved 24 March 2008. 
50. ^ den 11. time. Danmarks Radio. DR 2. 24 October 2007.

Further reading

• Åslund, Anders (1991). Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform. Cornell University Press. 
• Farnham, Barbara (2001). Reagan and the Gorbachev Revolution: Perceiving the End of Threat. 2. Political Science Quarterly. 
• Goldman, Marshall (1992). What Went Wrong with Perestroika?. W.W. Norton. 
• Gorbachev, Mikhail (1988). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-091528-5. 
• Gorbachev, Mikhail (1996). Memoirs. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48019-9. 
• Gorbachev, Mikhail; Daisaku Ikeda (2005). Moral Lesson of the Twentieth Century. 
• Hough, Jerry F (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991. Brookings Institution Press. ISBN 0815737483. 
• Jackson, William D. (1998-1999). Soviet Reassassment of Ronald Reagan, 1985-1988. 4. Political Science Quarterly. 
• Kishlansky, Mark (2001). 4. ed. Sources of the West: Readings in Western Civilization. 2. New York: Longman. 
• Matlock, Jack (1995). Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. 
• Remnick, David (1993). Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House. 
• Strayer, Robert (1998). Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? Understanding Historical Change. M.E. Sharpe. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mikhail Gorbachev

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mikhail Gorbachev

• MikhailGorbachev.org
• The Gorbachev Foundation
• Public Opinion about Gorbachev
• The Encyclopaedia of Marxism, from which parts of this article have been taken.
• Green Cross International official site
• Mikhail S. Gorbachev Biography, in Russian
• Out in the Cold Guardian interview 8 March 2005
• TIME 100 for 2004: Mikhail Gorbachev
• CNN Cold War – Profile: Mikhail Gorbachev from the 1998 series
  • September 1997 interview
• Biography, talks, tributes and quotes
• Ubben Lecture at DePauw University
• Mikhail Gorbachev's op/ed commentaries for Project Syndicate
• Commanding Heights: Mikhail Gorbachev (PBS interview), April 2001.
• USSR – USA: Summit Documents and Materials, Washington 30 May – 3 June 1990
• Speech by Yegor Gaidar (acting prime minister of Russia, minister of economy, and first deputy prime minister between 1991 and 1994), explaining the underlying reasons for Gorbachev's politics

Party political offices
Preceded by Konstantin Chernenko	General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1985–1991	Succeeded by Vladimir Ivashko
Political offices
Preceded by Andrei Gromyko as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet	Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1988–1989) Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (1989–1990) President of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) 1988–1991	Succeeded by Position abolished
Awards and achievements
Preceded by -	Recipient of The Ronald Reagan Freedom Award 1992	Succeeded by Colin Powell

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Persondata
NAME	Gorbachev, Mikhail
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Горбачёв, Михаи́л Серге́евич (Russian); Gorbačëv, Mihail Sergeevič (alternate transliteration); Gorbachyov, Mikhail Sergeyevich (alternate transliteration)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	leader of the Soviet Union
DATE OF BIRTH	2 March 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH	Privolnoye, Russia
DATE OF DEATH	living
PLACE OF DEATH	living

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