In the West, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is regarded as one of the key figures who helped end the Cold War and bring down the curtain on Communism. But in his native Russia, the Soviet Union’s last leader remains a deeply controversial politician, regarded by many older Russians as a traitor who destroyed their empire from within.
Born to a peasant family on March 2, 1931, in the southern Russian province of Stavropol Krai, he became active in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and studied law at the Moscow State University. While at university he met and married Raisa Titarenko.
His wife Raisa achieved widespread fame and recognition for her charity work, supporting Russia’s cultural heritage as well as education and health programmes. She died of leukaemia in 1999.
The couple has one daughter, Irina, who runs her father’s foundation today, protecting and promoting his historical legacy.
Having joined the CPSU in 1952, Gorbachev graduated with a degree in law from Moscow State University in 1955. In the late 1950s, he became first secretary of the Stavropol Komsomol City Committee.
In 1967, he completed a correspondence course and graduated from the Stavropol Agricultural Institute. Three years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU. He was appointed agriculture secretary of the Central Committee in 1978 and became a full member of the Politburo in 1980. Gorbachev was to be a member of the Politburo until 1991.
His rise was, in part, due to the support of influential ideologue Mikhail Suslov.
Under General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Yuri Andropov, from 1982 to 1984, Gorbachev was a prominent member of the Politburo, helping to bring a new generation of politicians into the top level of government. From 1984 to 1985, he served as chairman for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Soviet Union.
In March 1985, Gorbachev became general secretary, the first leader of the Soviet Union to have been born after the October Revolution. He would serve in this position until August 24, 1991.
By the 1980s the Soviet economy was in drastic need of reform. In 1985, after three elderly leaders died in quick succession, Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary and head of the Soviet Union. At 54 he was one of the youngest leaders and was seen as the new broom that could clean up the decrepit Soviet system.
Gorbachev hinged his efforts to revitalise the Soviet Union on two plans: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). By relaxing bureaucracy and censorship Gorbachev hoped to transform the Stalinist Soviet regime into a more modern social democracy. While glasnost was widely celebrated, his attempts to restructure the Soviet economy largely floundered.
Gorbachev saw that vast sums of money were being poured into the military to keep up with the United States. Desperate to free up this money, Gorbachev fostered a warmer relationship with the West.
On the foreign stage, he embraced the West, forging close working relations with US President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s then prime minister. Thatcher once famously said of him: “I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.”
In a series of high-profile summits Gorbachev met Reagan and the two men made important nuclear disarmament agreements. The thaw in relations effectively signalled the end of the Cold War.
But living standards for ordinary people across the USSR collapsed on his watch. The Soviet Union itself began to fall apart at the seams, sparking serious bloodshed.
Inspired by glasnost, and comforted by Gorbachev’s refusal to use military power, several Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet republics declared their intentions to free themselves from Communist rule. By the end of his tenure the Berlin Wall had been pulled down and large republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania had declared their independence.
In 1990 Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, he said, “I do not regard the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize as an award to me personally, but as a recognition of what we call perestroika and innovative political thinking, which is of vital significance for human destinies all over the world.”
In 1991 reactionary hardliners in the Communist Party, fearing the collapse of the Soviet Union, attempted to remove Gorbachev. Imprisoned in his dacha holiday home in the Crimea, Gorbachev listened on the radio as the military attempted to seize control of the Russian parliament. Thwarted by the efforts of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and mass protests, the coup failed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow but soon realised that the balance of power and popular support had shifted to Yeltsin.
After the failed coup Yeltsin struck two blows that effectively ended the Soviet Union and in the process, the career of Gorbachev. First, as President of Russia, Yeltsin banned all Communist Party activity on Russian soil. Secondly he, along with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, signed a treaty to create a new commonwealth of republics. Without these key nations the Soviet Union was defunct. Gorbachev recognised the inevitable and resigned.
After forming several new parties and failing to win support, Gorbachev’s political career was over.
Post Soviet Union, Gorbachev continued to be a prominent public figure, appearing in advertisements and releasing an album dedicated to his late wife to raise money for his charity foundations. In 1992 he became president of the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (also known as The Gorbachev Foundation) and the following year founded and became president of Green Cross International.
Gorbachev also continues to voice his opinion on domestic and international affairs. He opposed the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the Iraq war in 2003. Following the outbreak of the 2008 South Ossetia war, Gorbachev criticised US support for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in an article for “The Washington Post”.
“By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its “national interest”, the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone’s interest. But it is simply common sense to recognise that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region,” he wrote.
–Compiled from BBC, the Daily Telegraph and russiaprofile.org
This column aims to profile personalities who made the news once but have now faded from the spotlight.
What he said:
It’s difficult to accept one’s own mistakes ... I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.
Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organisation cannot live a full-blooded life.
It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.
