Mikhail Gorbachev

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus, into a peasant family so poor his parents had married as teenagers and lived in an adobe-walled hut belonging to his grandfather. He died in Moscow on the 30th of August 2022, at 91, as the last leader of a country that no longer existed. Between those two dates, he presided over the single most consequential unraveling of a superpower in the modern era. How did a boy who worked a combine harvester for twenty hours a day come to hold the fate of the Soviet Union in his hands? And once he held it, why did everything come apart?

• 2. A Peasant Boy in Stalin's World

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  Privolnoye was divided between Russians and ethnic Ukrainians, and Gorbachev carried both bloodlines. His paternal family had come from Voronezh generations earlier; his maternal family had migrated from Chernigov. His parents named him Viktor at birth, but his mother Maria insisted on a secret baptism, where his paternal grandfather christened him Mikhail.

  The famine of 1930-1933 killed two of his paternal uncles and an aunt. Both of his grandfathers were sent to labor camps during the Great Purge. Maria’s father, released in December 1938, told the young Gorbachev about being tortured by the secret police. That account never left him.

  During the Second World War, German forces occupied Privolnoye for four and a half months. Gorbachev’s father Sergey fought at the front, was wrongly declared dead, and then survived the 1943 Battle of Kursk before returning home wounded. The school in Privolnoye stayed closed through much of the war, reopening only in autumn 1944.

  Over five consecutive summers beginning in 1946, Gorbachev returned home to operate a combine harvester alongside his father, sometimes for twenty hours a day. In 1948, the pair harvested over 800 tonnes of grain. Sergey was awarded the Order of Lenin for the feat; Gorbachev himself received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour the following year.

• 3. Moscow, Law School, Raisa

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  In June 1950, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party and applied to the law school of Moscow State University, then the most prestigious institution in the country. The university admitted him without an entrance examination, likely because of his worker-peasant background and his labor medal. Law was an unusual choice; it carried little prestige in Soviet society at the time. At nineteen, he boarded a train to Moscow, the first time he had ever left his home region.

  At the dormitory in Sokolniki District he initially felt out of place among urban students, but earned a reputation as someone who worked especially hard, often late into the night. He was outspoken in class yet private about his real views. He privately told fellow students that he believed confessions could be forced and therefore could not prove guilt, an opinion that cut directly against Soviet legal doctrine. When an antisemitic campaign culminated in the Doctors’ plot, he publicly defended Volodya Liberman, a Jewish student accused of disloyalty.

  His closest friend at Moscow State University was Zdenek Mlynár, a Czechoslovak student who would later become a principal ideologist of the 1968 Prague Spring. Mlynár recalled that despite growing unease about the Stalinist system, the two remained committed Marxist-Leninists.

  Gorbachev met Raisa Titarenko in the university’s philosophy department. She had been engaged to another man; when that engagement ended, she and Gorbachev began visiting bookstores, museums, and art exhibits together. On the 25th of September 1953 they registered their marriage at Sokolniki Registry Office. He graduated in June 1955 with a distinction; his final paper argued the advantages of socialist democracy over liberal democracy. Raisa abandoned her own PhD program to follow him to Stavropol, where he had found work.

• 4. The Making of a Reformer

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  Gorbachev arrived in Stavropol in August 1955 and quickly moved from the procurator’s office to Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization. He visited villages across the region and tried to improve conditions for their inhabitants, establishing a discussion circle in Gorkaya Balka to help peasants build social connections.

  Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in February 1956 ignited the period biographer William Taubman later said Gorbachev “embodied”. He helped spread Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist message across Stavropol, but encountered many locals who still revered Stalin and considered the purges just.

  Between 1970 and 1977 he made five trips to Western Europe as part of Soviet delegations. He visited Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France twice. He was struck by how openly West Europeans criticized their political leaders, a freedom absent from Soviet life. He later said these visits “shook our a priori belief in the superiority of socialist over bourgeois democracy.” During this period he also began reading translations of restricted texts by Western Marxist authors including Antonio Gramsci and Roger Garaudy.

  In April 1970, aged 39, Gorbachev became First Secretary of the Stavropol kraikom, the most senior party post in the region. He was considerably younger than his predecessors. He oversaw the expansion of irrigation systems through the Great Stavropol Canal and, for overseeing a record grain harvest in Ipatovsky district, was awarded the Order of the October Revolution by Brezhnev in March 1972. Gradually, he concluded that Soviet economic failures were caused not by incompetence in the regions but by excessive centralization of decision-making in Moscow.

• 5. General Secretary

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  On the 11th of March 1985, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as the eighth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, following the death of Konstantin Chernenko. He was the youngest member of the Politburo’s highest tier, a distinction he had held since 1980.

  His two reform programs announced themselves with Russian words that quickly became known around the world. Glasnost, meaning openness, expanded freedom of speech and the press. Perestroika, meaning restructuring, sought to decentralize economic decision-making. A third concept, demokratizatsiya, moved toward democratic participation. Together they were designed to save the Soviet state, not dissolve it.

  Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and met United States president Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavik Summit to discuss limiting nuclear weapons and ending the Cold War. He also proposed a three-stage program for abolishing all nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century. In December 1984, before becoming General Secretary, he had visited Britain at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s request. At the end of that visit Thatcher said: “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”

  In March 1989, the formation of the elected Congress of People’s Deputies gave Soviet citizens a genuine voice in governance and quietly eroded the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. When Warsaw Pact countries held multi-party elections in 1989 and replaced their Marxist-Leninist governments, Gorbachev declined to send in troops. In October 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; he acknowledged “mixed feelings” about the honor. Polls at the time showed that 90% of Soviet citizens disapproved of the award, viewing it as an anti-Soviet gesture.

• 6. The Coup and the Collapse

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  In August 1991, Gorbachev was on holiday at his dacha in Foros, Crimea, when a group of senior Communist Party figures he described as the “Gang of Eight” launched a coup. They demanded he declare a state of emergency. He refused. The coup plotters announced that he was ill and that Vice President Yanayev would take charge.

  In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the White House and gave a speech condemning the coup. Protesters blocked troops from storming the building. Within days the coup collapsed; its leaders lacked the support they needed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow, thanked Yeltsin, and resigned as General Secretary two days later.

  The subsequent unraveling moved faster than Gorbachev had believed possible. On the 1st of December 1991, Ukraine held a referendum in which 90% of voters chose secession, a result Gorbachev had not expected. Without his knowledge, Yeltsin met with Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich in Belovezha Forest on the 8th of December and signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring the Soviet Union dissolved and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. Gorbachev learned of the agreement when Shushkevich phoned him; he was furious.

  On the 25th of December 1991, Gorbachev gave a televised resignation speech in the Kremlin, announcing: “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” He cited as achievements the introduction of political and religious freedom, the end of totalitarianism, and the conclusion of the arms race. The following day the Supreme Soviet voted the country out of existence. As of the 31st of December 1991, all Soviet institutions not absorbed by Russia ceased to function.

• 7. After the Soviet Union

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  Gorbachev launched his foundation in March 1992 with Yakovlev and Revenko as its first vice presidents. To keep it financially alive he began lecturing internationally for large fees, appeared in television commercials and advertisements, and in 1992 toured the United States in a Forbes private jet. He wrote a monthly syndicated column for The New York Times and published his memoirs in Russian in 1995 and in English the following year.

  In 1993, he launched Green Cross International, focused on sustainable development. In 1996, he ran in the Russian presidential election, traveling to twenty cities for rallies. He finished seventh, receiving approximately 386,000 votes, roughly 0.5% of the total.

  His wife Raisa was diagnosed with leukemia in July 1999. With the help of German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, she was transferred to a cancer center in Münster and underwent chemotherapy. She died in September of that year. His daughter Irina and his two granddaughters moved into his Moscow home to live with him.

  Gorbachev grew increasingly critical of Vladimir Putin over time. In July 2022, his close friend Alexei Venediktov reported that Gorbachev was deeply upset by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and believed Putin had “destroyed his life’s work.” Venediktov said Gorbachev was calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the start of peace negotiations. Gorbachev died at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow on the 30th of August 2022. His funeral was held on the 3rd of September in the Column Hall of the House of Unions, without the honors of a state funeral. He is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, in the same grave as Raisa, as his will had requested.

• 8. A Divided Legacy

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  A 2017 Levada Center survey found that 46% of Russian citizens held a negative opinion of Gorbachev, 30% were indifferent, and only 15% viewed him positively. In Western countries the picture was strikingly different. American press coined the term “Gorbymania” to describe the large crowds that turned out to greet his visits in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Time named him its “Man of the Decade” for the 1980s.

  Biographer William Taubman characterized him as “a visionary who changed his country and the world, though neither as much as he wished.” Taubman also noted that in allowing the Soviet Union to dissolve without civil war, Gorbachev achieved something the breakup of Yugoslavia, occurring at the same time, did not. Historian Mark Galeotti argued that Gorbachev’s predecessor Andropov was “the godfather of the Gorbachev revolution,” since Andropov’s KGB credentials allowed him to advocate reform without his Soviet loyalty being questioned.

  General Varennikov, one of the architects of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, called him “a renegade and traitor to your own people.” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov stated that Gorbachev’s rule brought “absolute sadness, misfortune and problems” for all the peoples of the country. Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said that Lithuanians would not forget the January Events of 1991, when Soviet troops attacked protesters in Vilnius, killing fifteen.

  McCauley wrote that Gorbachev “set reforms in motion without understanding where they could lead,” and that “never in his worst nightmare could he have imagined that perestroika would lead to the destruction of the Soviet Union.” In 2004, Gorbachev, together with Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren, received the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for a recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 work Peter and the Wolf.