Gorbachev

Soviet president. Born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev was the winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in ending the Cold War and promoting disarmament. He also sparked revolutionary political changes in his native country and throughout Eastern Europe.
On March 11, 1985, a new era in Soviet and world history began with the election of Mikhail Gorbachev to the USSR's top leadership position, that of general secretary of the Communist party. From the outset, it was clear that Gorbachev was "no Cold War dinosaur," as one reporter put it. A fifty-four year-old product of the communist establishment, Gorbachev was much younger and better educated than his predecessors and radiated an infectious energy and drive. He was also the first general secretary to have come of age after the terror and paranoia that marked the Josef Stalin era. His presence on the national and international scene hinted at major changes to come, and over the next six-and-a-half years Gorbachev did his best to live up to that impression. In the process, he launched a veritable revolution whose outcome is still very much in doubt.

Born in a village near the city of Stavropol, in the heart of one of southern Russia's most fertile agricultural regions, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev is the son of Sergei Andreevich Gorbachev, a mechanic on a state-run collective farm, and Maria Panteleevna Gorbachev, also a farm worker. Life for nearly everyone in the village revolved around harvest times; Mikhail and most of his classmates usually spent their vacations from school helping in the fields. In 1950, Gorbachev left home to study law at Moscow University, where he joined the Komsomol, or Young Communist League, an organization that served as a training ground for the future leaders of the Communist party (and thus of the Soviet Union). Soon he was devoting more time to politics than to his studies, and in 1954 he was elected head of the university's Komsomol chapter. Following his graduation in 1955, Gorbachev, who had hoped to stay in Moscow and work for the central government, was instead sent back to Stavropol and a minor position with the local Komsomol group.
Over the next two decades, Gorbachev steadily made his way up the political hierarchy (mostly in various agriculture-related posts), first at the local and regional level and, beginning in 1970, at the national level. In that year, he became a representative to the Supreme Soviet, the USSR's parliament. The following year, he was named to the powerful Central Committee, the inner circle of people in charge of running the government. In 1978, the Central Committee elected Gorbachev to the post of agricultural secretary, and in 1979 he was made a nonvoting member of the Politburo, the Central Committee's policy-making body. A year later, he was promoted to full membership in the Politburo.

In late 1982, one of Gorbachev's mentors, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, became head of the Soviet Union upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev, whose tenure as general secretary had been marked by widespread government inefficiency, corruption, and a sense that the nation had been drifting along without true leadership.
Andropov immediately tapped Gorbachev to be his chief aide, and together the two men initiated some bold reforms, including purging dishonest and incompetent officials from the party, cracking down on alcoholism, absenteeism and poor performance in the workplace, and taking steps to decentralize key industries.
Andropov's death in 1984 after only fourteen months in office dealt a serious blow to these efforts, especially after Brezhnev loyalist Konstantin Chernenko was named to succeed him. Gorbachev nevertheless remained a powerful figure in the Politburo and gradually assumed many of Chernenko's public duties as the elderly leader's health began to fail. On one memorable trip to Great Britain in December, 1984, Gorbachev--by this time the heir-apparent to the ailing Chernenko--charmed conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Western reporters with his intelligence and sophistication, his self-confident demeanor, his ready smile, and his sense of humor. (His wife, Raisa, earned points for her stylish dress and ability to speak some English.) At the conclusion of their talks, an obviously impressed Thatcher declared, "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together."

Three months later, in March, 1985, the world learned it would have a chance to "do business" with Gorbachev when the announcement came that he had been elected general secretary of the Communist party and leader of the Soviet Union following Chernenko's death.

 From the moment he took office, Gorbachev made it clear that he intended to proceed vigorously with a complete overhaul of the Soviet system from top to bottom, focusing on changes that would get the economy moving, scale back the bureaucracy, and rejuvenate the party.
To that end, he renewed the crackdowns on corruption, alcoholism, and incompetency and instituted cash incentives and bonus consumer goods for industrial and agricultural workers who improved productivity. He tackled the issue of decentralization and fostered greater independence among local factory managers by giving them more authority to decide schedules and quotas. He introduced new technology and stressed the importance of quality, of delivering goods in a timely fashion, and of anticipating and meeting consumer demand for specific products--concepts almost totally foreign to Soviet citizens.

To revitalize the government and the party, Gorbachev forced many of the older and more conservative leaders to retire or accept lesser positions that effectively removed them from power. He also replaced many lower-level bureaucrats and party officials. And unlike his typically dour and aloof predecessors, he tried to gain the respect and even the affection of the Soviet people by speaking to them in a down-to-earth manner that combined a genuine sense of concern with a blunt frankness.

Gorbachev's impact on the international scene was equally forceful.

His top priority was improving the somewhat chilly relations between the Soviet Union and the West, particularly the United States; the detente of the 1970s had given way to a new arms race in the 1980s when the Reagan administration decided to proceed with the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars" project, a complex system of defense against nuclear missiles. Realizing that any attempt by the Soviet Union to create a similar system of its own would probably devastate the country economically and shatter his plans for reform and recovery, Gorbachev surprised the world by proposing sweeping arms cuts on both sides, including a ban on nuclear weapons by the year 2000. On four separate occasions, he met with President Reagan to hammer out a weapons treaty that was finalized in December, 1987, during the Soviet leader's first visit to the United States.
Earlier that same year, Gorbachev announced a new series of domestic reforms, including expanded freedoms and the democratization of the political process, all of which were to be achieved through his policies of social and economic restructuring, or perestroika, and openness, or glasnost. (Some of the very first hints of glasnost had appeared in late 1986, when Gorbachev ended the exile of Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, who had been banished in 1980 for speaking out against the government.) Before long, Soviet writers were taking advantage of their new freedom to examine, discuss, analyze, and even criticize the past and the present openly without fear of reprisal.

Gorbachev continued to amaze the world throughout the rest of the decade.
 In April, 1988, for example, he announced his decision to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, where they had been entrenched in a bloody and futile guerrilla war for nearly ten years. In December, during a dramatic speech before the United Nations, he proposed deep cuts in the Soviet military budget, the withdrawal of 50,000 Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, and a 500,000-man reduction in the army's overall strength. It was also in 1988 that Gorbachev first expressed his intention to end the Communist party's control of the day-to-day operations of the country and create new, elected political institutions.
Social and political reforms continued at a dizzying pace throughout 1989. In March, the Soviet people voted in the first democratic elections in their nation's history; later, they watched on television as their newly elected legislators debated Soviet policy. In April came news that the antireligion laws of the 1960s had been rescinded. But by far the most breathtaking changes of that year occurred outside the Soviet Union as communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania disintegrated (most peacefully) amid impassioned calls for political and economic reforms. Unlike his predecessors, who had always been more than willing to use force to crush any signs of discontent in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev made it clear that he felt the Soviet Union had no moral right to interfere in the affairs of other countries. Behind the scenes he did his best to discourage violent crackdowns on demonstrators and persuaded a few of the more hard-line communist leaders to resign.Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the year came on November 9 with the opening of the Berlin Wall, for nearly thirty years a grim reminder of the hostility and suspicion dividing East and West. Gorbachev was universally acclaimed as the man who had finally brought the Cold War to an end.
Though Gorbachev basked in the adulation of the Western democracies at the close of the 1980s, at home he was the target of widespread criticism and dissatisfaction. The giddy excitement and optimism that had characterized his first few years in office evaporated as the Soviet people were forced to deal with inflation and chronic shortages of basic consumer goods that rivaled those of the World War II era. In 1990, emboldened by the democracy movements in Eastern Europe, the Baltic states and Ukraine began agitating for independence, and ethnic and religious violence erupted in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Faced with the growing threat of anarchy and the need to strike a balance between hard-line conservatives and radical reformers like Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, Gorbachev began to back away from many of his more drastic proposals (especially his plan to dismantle the central economy and create a free-market system) and assume a far more moderate position, suggesting to some Western observers that he had succumbed to the hard-liners' demands.

In the midst of this domestic chaos came news that Gorbachev had won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his bold moves to improve the international political climate.

The Soviets greeted the news with indifference and even some hostility, but Gorbachev expressed hope that such an important reaffirmation of his policies would energize him for the battles still ahead.
Throughout the first half of 1991, the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of self-destruction, and Gorbachev continued to retreat from his earlier policies, increasing speculation that the reactionary wing of the Communist party was indeed gaining influence over him. In January, just three months after the Nobel announcement, troops opened fire on demonstrators in Lithuania and killed fourteen people, tarnishing Gorbachev's reputation as a peacemaker and prompting fears of violent crackdowns elsewhere or even civil war. (The Soviet chief insisted he had been asleep when it happened and did not know anything about it until he woke up.) In a nationwide referendum held in March, the country approved Gorbachev's proposed Union Treaty, an arrangement that would have transferred sweeping powers from the central government to the republics while preserving the USSR. After several months of squabbling over the terms of the treaty, Gorbachev and leaders of some of the republics finally reached agreement and made plans to sign the new union into effect on August 20.

But on August 18, a group of hard-line communists staged a coup and held Gorbachev and his family under house arrest at their summer home in the Crimea. In Moscow, Yeltsin called on his Russian supporters to resist the takeover.
For three days angry Muscovites squared off against a contingent of tanks the coup plotters had assembled around Yeltsin's headquarters; similar confrontations between Soviet troops and citizens occurred elsewhere in the country. It quickly became clear, however, that there was little support for the hard-liners, and by August 21 the coup had failed. Gorbachev immediately headed back to Moscow to resume power.
Over the next four months, Gorbachev repeatedly tried to reassert his authority, and for a time it appeared that he might succeed. He resigned as head of the Communist party and urged its disbandment for the role it had played in the failed coup. Abandoning his earlier moderate stance, he also pledged his renewed support for radical reform. But it was too little, too late; Yeltsin had gained the upper hand as a result of his heroics during the coup, and one republic after another declared its independence. Gorbachev nevertheless fought to preserve at least a form of economic and military unity, warning of "catastrophe for all mankind" if the union splintered. By the end of December, however, the USSR was no more. In its place stood the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose federation made up of eleven of the fifteen former Soviet republics. The Russian republic was acknowledged as the successor to the Soviet Union, thus strengthening the perception of Yeltsin as the man in charge. On December 25, 1991, a bitter and humiliated Gorbachev formally resigned as head of the Soviet Union.

Although it is too early to tell how history will ultimately judge Mikhail Gorbachev, most analysts agree that he will be remembered as one of the pivotal figures of the twentieth century, more for what he did for the world than for his own people. He took office announcing his intention to reform communism, not destroy it, and his biggest failure was stubbornly sticking to that goal even after it was clear that the system was so corrupted that there was virtually nothing worth saving. As a result, the Soviet people saw their standard of living decline rather than improve during his tenure. But his legacy also includes bringing an end to the Cold War and allowing freedom and democracy to take root in countries that had known only totalitarianism for more than four decades. For making those things possible Mikhail Gorbachev will no doubt be remembered as a leader who was swept aside by the very forces he unleashed--a man who, notes Gail Sheehy, "changed the world and lost his country."