Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Russian and Soviet politician. The
eighth and final leader of the
Soviet Union, he was the
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. He was also the country's head of state from 1988 until 1991, serving as the chairman of the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, chairman of the
Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and
president of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to
Marxism–Leninism, but he moved towards
social democracy by the early 1990s.
Gorbachev was born in
Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, to a poor peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. Growing up under the rule of
Joseph Stalin, in his youth he operated
combine harvesters on a
collective farm before joining the
Communist Party, which then governed the Soviet Union as a
one-party state according to the prevailing interpretation of Marxist–Leninist doctrine. While studying at
Moscow State University, he married fellow student
Raisa Titarenko in 1953 prior to receiving his law degree in 1955. Moving to
Stavropol, he worked for the
Komsomol youth organization and, after Stalin's death, became a keen proponent of the
de-Stalinization reforms of Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev. He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, in which position he oversaw construction of the
Great Stavropol Canal. In 1978, he returned to
Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's
Central Committee, and in 1979 joined its governing
Politburo. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief regimes of
Yuri Andropov and
Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as General Secretary, the de facto head of government, in 1985.
Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and to its
socialist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform was necessary, particularly after the 1986
Chernobyl disaster. He withdrew from the
Soviet–Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States president
Ronald Reagan to limit
nuclear weapons and end the
Cold War. Domestically, his policy of
glasnost ("openness") allowed for enhanced
freedom of speech and
press, while his
perestroika ("restructuring") sought to decentralize economic decision-making to improve efficiency. His
democratization measures and formation of the elected
Congress of People's Deputies undermined the one-party state. Gorbachev declined to intervene militarily when various
Eastern Bloc countries
abandoned Marxist–Leninist governance in 1989–1990. Internally, growing
nationalist sentiment threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading Marxist–Leninist hardliners to launch the unsuccessful
August Coup against Gorbachev in 1991. In the wake of this, the
Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes and he resigned. After leaving office, he launched his
Gorbachev Foundation, became a vocal critic of Russian presidents
Boris Yeltsin and
Vladimir Putin, and campaigned for Russia's social-democratic movement. Gorbachev died in 2022 after a period of "severe and prolonged illness".
Widely considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century, Gorbachev remains the subject of controversy. The recipient of a wide range of awards, including the
Nobel Peace Prize, he was widely praised for his pivotal role in ending the Cold War, introducing new political and economic freedoms in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist–Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the
reunification of Germany. Conversely, he is often derided in Russia and the other former Soviet states for accelerating the Soviet dissolution, an event which brought a decline in Russia's global influence and precipitated an economic collapse.
