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Mikhail Gorbachev: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in the village of Privolnoye, a place where the soil was rich but the human cost of Soviet policy was catastrophic. His early years were defined by the shadow of the Great Famine of 1930 to 1933, which claimed the lives of two of his paternal uncles and an aunt, and the subsequent Great Purge that sent both of his grandfathers to labor camps. His maternal grandfather, a man who had helped establish the local collective farm, spoke of being tortured by the secret police after his release in December 1938, a story that would haunt the young Gorbachev and shape his understanding of the state's capacity for cruelty. While his father, Sergey, fought on the frontlines during the Second World War and was wrongly declared dead before returning injured from the Battle of Kursk, Mikhail spent his childhood operating a combine harvester alongside his father, sometimes working twenty hours a day during the summers of the late 1940s. This grueling physical labor earned his father the Order of Lenin and young Mikhail the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, marking him as a model Soviet worker even as the political winds began to shift beneath his feet.
The Law Student Who Questioned Guilt
In 1950, at the age of nineteen, Gorbachev traveled by train to Moscow for the first time, leaving the rural isolation of the North Caucasus to study law at Moscow State University, an unusual choice for a peasant boy in a society that did not value jurisprudence. He lived in a dormitory in the Sokolniki District, where he quickly developed a reputation as a mediator and a student who worked late into the night, yet he remained deeply private about his true thoughts. While his peers debated the merits of the Soviet system, Gorbachev confided in trusted friends his opposition to the Soviet jurisprudential norm that a confession proved guilt, noting that such confessions could have been extracted through torture. He publicly defended a Jewish student named Volodya Liberman during an antisemitic campaign known as the Doctors' plot, an act of defiance that risked his future. His friendship with Zdeněk Mlynář, a Czechoslovak student who would later become a primary ideologist of the 1968 Prague Spring, revealed a shared commitment to Marxism-Leninism despite growing concerns about the Stalinist system. When Stalin died in March 1953, Gorbachev and Mlynář joined the crowds massing to see the dictator's body lying in state, a moment that signaled the end of an era and the beginning of a new, uncertain chapter for the Soviet Union.
The Reformer In The Provinces
By 1970, Gorbachev had risen to become the First Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, a position that granted him significant power over the region and made him a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He was only thirty-nine years old, considerably younger than his predecessors, and he quickly learned that the failures of the Soviet system were not merely the result of incompetence but of an excessive centralization of decision-making in Moscow. He began reading translations of restricted texts by Western Marxist authors such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Aragon, and his worldview began to shift as he traveled to Western Europe on five occasions between 1970 and 1977. During these trips, he was struck by how openly West Europeans offered their opinions and criticized their political leaders, something that was absent from the Soviet Union where most people did not feel safe speaking so openly. He later related that for him and his wife, these visits shook their a priori belief in the superiority of socialist over bourgeois democracy, planting the seeds of the reforms that would eventually dismantle the empire he was sworn to protect.
When was Mikhail Gorbachev born and where did he grow up?
Mikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in the village of Privolnoye. He grew up in the North Caucasus region where his family suffered losses during the Great Famine of 1930 to 1933 and the Great Purge.
What major political reforms did Mikhail Gorbachev implement as leader of the Soviet Union?
Mikhail Gorbachev implemented the policies of glasnost to improve freedom of speech and perestroika to decentralize economic decision-making. He also withdrew troops from the Soviet-Afghan War and declined to intervene militarily when Warsaw Pact countries abandoned Marxist-Leninist governance in 1989.
How did Mikhail Gorbachev respond to the coup attempt in August 1991?
Mikhail Gorbachev refused to declare a state of emergency during the coup attempt in August 1991 and was kept under house arrest at his dacha in Foros, Crimea. He returned to Moscow two days later and resigned as general secretary after the coup failed.
When did the Soviet Union officially cease to exist under Mikhail Gorbachev's presidency?
The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist on the 31st of December 1991 after the Supreme Soviet voted the country out of existence. Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as Soviet president on the 25th of December 1991 and vacated the Kremlin by the 29th of December.
When and where did Mikhail Gorbachev die?
Mikhail Gorbachev died at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow on the 30th of August 2022. He was ninety-one years old at the time of his death following a severe and prolonged illness.
In 1980, at the age of forty-nine, Gorbachev became the youngest member of the Politburo, the highest decision-making authority in the Communist Party, following a rapid ascent through the ranks that saw him appointed secretary of the Central Committee in 1978. He concentrated his attentions on agriculture, but the harvests of 1979, 1980, and 1981 were all poor due largely to weather conditions, and the country had to import increasing quantities of grain. He had growing concerns about the country's agricultural management system, coming to regard it as overly centralized and requiring more bottom-up decision-making. In December 1979, when the Soviets sent armed forces into neighboring Afghanistan to support its Soviet-aligned government, Gorbachev privately thought it a mistake, though he sometimes openly supported the government position. After the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982, Gorbachev became the closest ally of Yuri Andropov, who encouraged him to expand into policy areas other than agriculture. In April 1983, he delivered the annual speech marking the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, which required him to re-read many of Lenin's later writings, in which the latter had called for reform in the context of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, further encouraging Gorbachev's own conviction that reform was needed.
The Man Who Opened The Door
On the 11th of March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected the eighth general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, inheriting a country that was stagnating economically and diplomatically. He decided to withdraw troops from the Soviet-Afghan War and met with United States president Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavik Summit to discuss the limitation of nuclear weapons production and the ending of the Cold War. Domestically, his policy of glasnost, meaning openness, allowed for the improvement of freedom of speech and free press, while his perestroika, meaning restructuring, sought to decentralize economic decision-making to improve its efficiency. When various Warsaw Pact countries abandoned Marxist-Leninist governance in 1989, he declined to intervene militarily, a decision that allowed the revolutions of 1989 to proceed peacefully in most countries, though in Romania the revolution turned violent and led to the overthrow and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He believed that democratic elections would not lead Eastern European countries into abandoning their commitment to socialism, but his refusal to use force allowed the Iron Curtain to fall without the bloodshed that had characterized previous Soviet interventions.
The Coup That Destroyed Him
In August 1991, two weeks into his holiday at his dacha in Foros, Crimea, a group of senior Communist Party figures known as the Gang of Eight launched a coup d'état, demanding that Gorbachev declare a state of emergency. He refused, and was kept under house arrest in the dacha while the coup plotters publicly announced that he was ill and that Vice President Yanayev would take charge of the country. Boris Yeltsin entered the Moscow White House, and in front of the building, atop a tank, gave a memorable speech condemning the coup. The coup's leaders realized that they lacked sufficient support and ended their efforts, but the damage was done. Two days later, Gorbachev returned to Moscow and thanked Yeltsin, but he resigned as general secretary, and the Supreme Soviet indefinitely suspended all Communist Party activity, effectively ending communist rule in the Soviet Union. The coup had been intended to save the Soviet Union, but it instead accelerated its collapse, as the hardliners who had orchestrated it had no plan for what would come next.
The President Who Lost His Country
On the 8th of December 1991, without Gorbachev's knowledge, Boris Yeltsin met with Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich in the Belovezha Forest, near Brest, Belarus, and signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States as its successor. Gorbachev only learned of this development when Shushkevich phoned him, and he was furious. He desperately looked for an opportunity to preserve the Soviet Union, hoping that the media and intelligentsia would rally against its dissolution, but Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian Supreme Soviets then ratified the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States. On the 9th of December, Gorbachev issued a statement calling the agreement illegal and dangerous, but on the 25th of December, he announced his resignation as Soviet president and Commander-in-Chief, vacating the Kremlin by the 29th of December. The following day, the Soviet of the Republics voted the country out of existence, and as of the 31st of December 1991, all Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function. Gorbachev was the third out of eight Soviet leaders, after Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, not to die in office, but he was the only one to preside over the dissolution of the state he had sworn to protect.
The Critic Of The New Order
Out of office, Gorbachev and his wife Raisa initially lived in their dilapidated dacha on Rublevskoe Shosse, and he focused on establishing his foundation, launched in March 1992, to analyze and publish material on the history of perestroika and defend the policy. To finance his foundation, he began lecturing internationally, charging large fees, and appeared in television commercials and photograph advertisements to keep the foundation afloat. His wife, Raisa, founded a sub-division of the Gorbachev Foundation known as Raisa Maksimovna's Club to improve women's welfare in Russia, but she died of leukemia in September 1999, leaving Gorbachev to face the new Russia alone. He became a vocal critic of Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, arguing that the West had attempted to turn Russia into some kind of backwater and that the United States had broken its word and expanded NATO right up to Russia's borders. In July 2022, his close friend, journalist Alexei Venediktov, said that Gorbachev was very upset when he found out about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, believing that Putin had destroyed his life's work. He died at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow on the 30th of August 2022, at the age of ninety-one, after a severe and prolonged illness, leaving behind a legacy that remains deeply divided between those who see him as the greatest statesman of the second half of the 20th century and those who view him as the man who destroyed Russia.