Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Union and dissolved it instead. Born in 1931 to a peasant family in Stavropol, he drove a combine harvester as a teenager and won a decoration for it, which helped get him to Moscow State University to read law. Both his grandfathers had been arrested under Stalin. He rose through the Komsomol and the Stavropol party organisation, was brought to Moscow in 1978 with the agriculture portfolio, and became General Secretary in March 1985 at fifty-four — the first Soviet leader born after the revolution, after three had died in three years. His diagnosis was that the economy was stagnant and the system unreformable without opening it. Glasnost permitted criticism in the press, released political prisoners, and let the past be discussed; perestroika allowed cooperatives, leasing and eventually private enterprise; and elections with more than one candidate were held in 1989. Chernobyl in April 1986, and the weeks of official silence around it, convinced him that the secrecy was itself the disease. Abroad he ended the arms race, signing the INF Treaty in 1987 and withdrawing from Afghanistan by 1989, and told the Warsaw Pact governments that Soviet troops would not save them. They fell in months, and he let them. What he never accepted was the dissolution of the Union itself, and the failed coup by his own hardliners in August 1991 destroyed his authority and delivered the country to Yeltsin. He resigned on 25 December 1991 and the flag came down that evening.

• Lived: 1931 CE – 2022 CE
• Nationality: Soviet
• Roles: head_of_state, party_leader, reformer

Related

• The Cold War
• Gorbachev Comes to Power: Glasnost and Perestroika
• Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
• INF Treaty: Eliminating an Entire Class of Nuclear Weapons
• Revolutions of 1989: Eastern Europe's Annus Mirabilis
• Collapse of the Soviet Union