Mikhail Gorbachev

President of the Soviet Union (1990–1991)

• Born: March 2, 1931
• Birthplace: Privolnoye, Russia, Soviet Union
• Died: August 30, 2022
• Place of Death: Moscow, Russia

Gorbachev, as general-secretary of the Communist Party and also president of the Soviet Union, attempted to implement major improvements in the economy and society, underscoring his belief in the need for long-overdue reforms. Although he largely failed to achieve the domestic goals he sought, the significant changes in Soviet foreign policy that occurred during the Gorbachev era substantially affected the Cold War relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Early Life

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol Territory of the Soviet Union. This agricultural region, located north of the Caucasus Mountains, lies between the Black and Caspian seas. Gorbachev came from several generations of farmers. He was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church but did not practice the Christian faith. During World War II, German military forces occupied the area where he lived. Following the war, he continued his education and worked summers (1946–50) in local farming. He was awarded (1949) the Order of the Red Banner of Labor at age eighteen and graduated second in his high school class.

Gorbachev entered Moscow State University in the fall of 1950, graduating with a degree in law in 1955. During this period, he joined the Communist Party (1952) and married Raisa Maximovna Titorenko (1954). Following graduation, he returned to the Stavropol area, where he spent the next twenty-three years in Communist Party service.

Gorbachev’s initial responsibilities were in the Komsomol (Young Communist League). He became first secretary of the Stavropol City Komsomol organization in 1956, holding this position until 1958. Between 1958 and 1962, he worked in the Komsomol Committee for the Stavropol Territory (Krai) and eventually became first secretary of the group. By 1962, he was responsible for choosing party members for promotion and also headed a production board supervising collective and state farms. In 1963, Gorbachev became head of the agricultural department for the entire Stavropol region.

In 1966, Gorbachev moved into full-time party administration as First Secretary of the Stavropol City Communist Party Committee. Two years later, in August 1968, he became second secretary of the Stavropol Territory Communist Party Committee. In April, 1970, at age thirty-nine, Gorbachev was selected as first secretary of the Stavropol Territory Communist Party Committee and held this post until 1978. During these years he made several official foreign trips: East Germany (1966), Belgium (1972), West Germany (1975), and France (1976). He also was elected to membership in the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1971.

Life’s Work

His competence, honesty, and effective administration, as well as the support given by party leaders (Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov), eventually brought Gorbachev to national attention. A front-page interview in Pravda (1977) and a brief meeting with General-Secretary Leonid Ilich Brezhnev in September 1978, culminated in his assignment in November 1978, to Moscow as the party’s agricultural expert in the Secretariat. He held this position from 1978 to 1983. Although Gorbachev was known for his administrative skills and agricultural expertise, Soviet agriculture did not improve during his tenure. Gorbachev was elected in 1979 to the party’s ruling Politburo as a candidate member and was raised to full membership in October 1980. At the age of forty-nine, Gorbachev was the youngest member of this powerful group dominated by very senior party leaders.

Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev on the latter’s death in November, 1982, and shifted Gorbachev’s responsibilities to personnel evaluation and selection. On Andropov’s death in early 1984, Gorbachev nominated Konstantin Chernenko as general-secretary. During the brief Chernenko interlude, Gorbachev provided important party leadership and gained stature among his colleagues. During the post-Brezhnev period, he also led Soviet delegations to Canada (1983) and Britain (1984). In April 1984, he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission in the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. With Chernenko’s death on March 10, 1985, the party elite immediately elected Gorbachev as general-secretary.

An early priority for Gorbachev was to replace numerous government and party personnel at all levels. New appointments to the ruling party Politburo began in April, 1985, with other major changes in 1987 and 1988. More than half of the regional party secretaries and the Council of Ministers were replaced. In 1985 a new prime minister and new foreign minister were selected. Andrei Gromyko was named president in 1985 and served in that role until Gorbachev replaced him in the fall of 1988 by assuming that office with expanded authority. The Congress of People’s Deputies, under the revised parliamentary system, elected Gorbachev chairman of the Supreme Soviet in May, 1989. Extensive changes in the Central Committee occurred in April 1989, and many senior members were replaced. Gorbachev showed effective control and leadership of major party and government meetings, especially the Twenty-Seventh Communist Party Congress (1986), the Nineteenth Communist Party Conference (1988), and the Congress of People’s Deputies (1989).

The Soviet economy was recognized for years as a serious problem for its lack of productivity, cumbersome bureaucracy, waste, poor growth rates, supply bottlenecks, and reduced worker output. Improving the economy became the fundamental key to Gorbachev’s ultimate success or failure. His calls for greater labor effort, reduction of alcohol abuse among workers, and more flexibility of economic planning yielded mixed results. Several new approaches promised the potential for improvement, but productivity remained low. New policies to spur the economy included the cooperative system (allowing some limited free enterprise), economic accountability (enterprises must make a profit or face possible closure), and provision for some private ownership or long-term leases in agriculture.

These steps were part of Gorbachev’s famous policy of perestroika (restructuring) to make significant domestic reforms. He also promoted glasnost (openness) to candidly admit problems and seek public support for making meaningful changes. However, this led to widespread complaints about existing conditions, and the consensus he sought was difficult to achieve. The results proved to be controversial and often inadequate, and Gorbachev’s economic advisers predicted no substantial improvement of the economy from the implementation of these policies until 1992 at the earliest. Unemployment was expected to rise, creating further problems. Consumer goods, promised regularly, remained scarce for many citizens in the later 1980s. Some food rationing was imposed by the end of the decade. Ideology and reform blended in Gorbachev’s Marxist orientation and his efforts to make improvements. Yet he rejected changing the fundamental organizations and institutions of the nation and opposed a multiparty political system. Nevertheless, he called on the Communist Party and the public to be more efficient and patient during these ambitious adjustments and reforms. Gorbachev’s economic policies cut sharply at the ideological patterns of seven decades of Communist rule. In addition, several constitutional changes occurred, altering the national government’s structure and powers.

Foreign policy during the period reflected more flexibility in meeting Soviet defense needs and the costly effects of long-term competition with the United States. Moscow initiated significant revisions in the Cold War relationship. Gorbachev and United States president Ronald Reagan met in five summits (1985, 1986, 1987, and two in 1988). He also worked with President George H. W. Bush (1989-1990). The two superpowers signed important nuclear and chemical weapons arms control agreements in these years, and others were negotiated for later completion. Gorbachev undertook a nuclear testing moratorium for a lengthy period, called for the end of nuclear weapons by the year 2000, and, in December, 1988, made a significant address on this subject to the United Nations. His trips to other nations were remarkable for their positive effects and potential implications. Major trips in 1989 included those to West Germany, France, and China. Improvements in relations with allies and opponents became a prominent aspect of the Gorbachev years. The Soviet military leadership was extensively modified after Gorbachev came to power as a sign of the new orientation in Soviet military policy and international affairs. In one notable instance, the Soviet Union’s lengthy participation in the Afghanistan war, beginning in 1979 with Russia’s intervention, formally ended in early 1989 with withdrawal of Soviet combat forces. For these achievements, he was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize.

While Gorbachev’s international popularity was at its height, however, his reputation at home was rapidly deteriorating. His domestic policies created widespread public debate, and his economic reforms failed to achieve their goals. Serious and widespread problems broke into the open in 1988 and 1989. Frustration and discontent among the nation’s ethnic nationalities affected at least half of the nation’s fifteen constituent republics. Growing antigovernment demonstrations became increasingly common, and tough government responses intensified hostile public opinion and often caused casualties. Political activists, charging that Gorbachev was moving too slowly, attempted to create alternative political reform agendas and called for a multiparty political system. Growing labor unrest, especially among striking Soviet coal miners in the summer of 1989, threatened economic stability. Anti-Semitism and ethnic antipathies, suppressed under previous regimes, reappeared, and both the Eastern bloc countries and several of the Soviet republics began declaring their independence from the communist ideology and the Soviet Union itself. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, breaking into fifteen separate nations, and in late December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the nation’s president to be succeeded by his former protégé Boris Yeltsin as the new political leader of Russia.

Although he initially attempted to remain politically active, Gorbachev’s career and reputation were ruined. His candidacy for president of Russia in the election in 1996 resulted in an embarrassing loss, giving him less than 1 percent of the votes cast. Voters clearly held him responsible for the country’s problems and collapse. Gorbachev, however, always believed that Yeltsin bore the primary responsibility for that disastrous outcome.

In the aftermath of this national and personal crisis, Gorbachev began a new career to support human rights and quality-of-life issues for Russians and others worldwide. In January 1992, he became president of the International Nongovernmental Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (the Gorbachev Foundation) to support democratic rights in Russia and other nations. He established a research foundation in 1993, the Green Cross International, to focus on international environmental and ecological concerns, and he became president of that organization. Websites for both organizations describe their efforts and Gorbachev’s leadership. He continued an active writing and speaking career on these important issues. As a result, Gorbachev received many international awards and other recognition. Within Russia, he took a leadership role in the United Russian Social Democratic Party. In 2006 he became an investor in purchasing a Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, using it as a forum to promote democratic values and policies in his country.

His assessment of Vladimir Putin (president of Russia, 2000–2008, 2012–; prime minister of Russia, 1999, 2008–12) ) fluctuated, interpreting Putin as a positive leader seeking to eliminate some of the serious errors and negative conditions that existed in the Yeltsin years (1991–99). However, in 2005 Gorbachev called for the removal of the Putin cabinet for what he believed to be unsatisfactory social policies and domestic priorities affecting the Russian population. When Putin announced his intention to run in the 2012 presidential election, Gorbachev denounced the decision and warned that Russia was once again approaching the extreme bureaucracy that served as the undoing of its precursor.

Gorbachev generally maintained his positive view of the United States, but warned that America’s role as the world’s sole superpower in the twenty-first century intensified problems and controversies in international affairs that jeopardize world peace and stability. In 2009 Gorbachev wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post that the United States needed to implement what he called an "American perestroika" as a result of the economic crisis of 2008–9. He continued to speak on international issues, and he also remained critical of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev (Russian president, 2008–12; Russian prime minister, 2012–20).

Gorbachev faced numerous health problems later in life, and in 2015 the resulting complications prevented him from maintaining his schedule of international travel and public appearances. After supporting the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Gorbachev became increasingly critical of NATO's amassing of troops in Eastern Europe amidst the ongoing war in the Donbas region of Ukraine (although he later criticized both sides of the conflict for using military force instead of diplomatic methods). After Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Gorbachev Foundation issued a statement calling for an immediate end to the fighting in favor of peace talks.

Gorbachev died on August 30, 2022, at the age of ninety-one. At the time of his death, many celebrated his legacy as a bringer of peace and paid tribute to his role in ending the Cold War. However, Gorbachev remained a polarizing figure in Russian society and many in Russia lamented Gorbachev's failure to avoid the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Significance

Soviet society and culture saw significant and positive changes during Gorbachev’s tenure as a welcome change from the stifling system of his Communist predecessors. The concept of glasnost (openness) was reflected in more candid comments in the Soviet press and public opinion. Film, drama, and art became more experimental and outspoken in subject matter and approach. While some limits remained, glasnost went far beyond previous decades of Soviet rule. The primary purpose was to admit old problems and work for solutions. Gorbachev encouraged this behavior so long as it did not undermine national unity and security or his perestroika efforts. Soviet law and human rights issues also improved after late 1986. More citizens, especially Jews, were allowed to emigrate. Several punitive laws were not used as in the past to punish those who criticized the lack of human rights in the Soviet Union. Andrei Sakharov, for example, who was banished to Gorky by Brezhnev in early 1980, was permitted by Gorbachev to return to Moscow in December, 1986.

Time, however, worked against his reform program. Gorbachev and his advisers later admitted that the problems were far greater than originally identified. Public inertia, the stifling ideological system, an inefficient economic system, opposition within the Communist Party, and bureaucratic opposition to perestroika proved too difficult to overcome. In the meantime, the quality of life and standard of living for many citizens became worse, and they increasingly blamed Gorbachev for their discomfort. The public admission of problems in the era of glasnost further heightened frustration and anti-Gorbachev feeling. The Soviet superpower was ultimately reduced to an assortment of struggling, underdeveloped nations, and Russia’s decline was laid largely at the feet of its reform-minded leader.

In the years following his leadership of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev set new goals for his personal and professional life. The lingering illness and death in November 1999, of his wife, Raisa, removed an important emotional and productive life partner who had sustained and supported him over the decades. Despite this, Gorbachev continued to be involved in Russian and international politics. His efforts as an advocate of environmental concerns, along with promoting democratic values and institutions, greatly enhanced his reputation on the world scene in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upon his death in 2022, leaders from around the world paid tribute to his immense impact on twentieth century history.

Bibliography

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