Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, into a peasant family in the village of Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeisky District, Stavropol territory, in the North Caucasus of the Soviet Union. His father, Sergei Andreyevich Gorbachev, was a combine harvester operator on a collective farm; his mother was Maria Gorbacheva, née Gopkalo. In 1942 German forces occupied the Privolnoye area.⁠[1][2]

In 1945 he began working as an assistant to a combine harvester operator. In 1949, at 17, he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, its youngest recipient. In 1950 he graduated from secondary school with a silver medal.⁠[2][1]

Gorbachev entered the law faculty of Moscow State University without entrance examinations and received his law degree with honors in 1955. Having been active in the Komsomol, he became a candidate member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1950 and a full member in 1952.⁠[1][3]

On September 25, 1953, he married Raisa Titarenko, a philosophy student at the university.⁠[1][2]

After graduating Gorbachev returned to Stavropol for Komsomol work, becoming first secretary of the Stavropol city Komsomol committee in September 1956, second secretary of the territorial Komsomol committee on April 25, 1958, and its first secretary on March 21, 1961. In 1961 he attended the 22nd Party Congress in Moscow as a delegate from Stavropol.⁠[1][2]

In 1962 he took a key Stavropol party post responsible for personnel in administration, farms and industry, and from 1964 to 1967 he studied for a second degree at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute. He became first secretary of the Stavropol city party committee on September 26, 1966, and second secretary of the territorial committee on August 5, 1969.⁠[2][1]

On April 10, 1970, Gorbachev became first secretary of the Stavropol territorial committee, governing an area of 2.4 million people; in 1971 he became a member of the CPSU Central Committee.⁠[1][2]

On November 27, 1978, he was elected secretary of the CPSU Central Committee for agriculture and moved to Moscow on December 6 that year. He became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 and a full member in 1980, then its youngest full member.⁠[1][3][2]

On March 11, 1985, the day after Konstantin Chernenko died, the Politburo elected Gorbachev general secretary of the CPSU.⁠[3]

Gorbachev pursued a policy of perestroika (restructuring), introducing limited free-market mechanisms and using multicandidate contests and secret ballots in some elections. From 1987–88 his policy of glasnost (openness) greatly expanded freedom of expression and information. The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian notes that he sought to restructure the Soviet economy, reduce military spending and ease tensions abroad.⁠[3][4]

In November 1985 Gorbachev met U.S. President Ronald ReaganRonald ReaganRonald Reagan (1911–2004) was an American politician and actor who worked as a radio sports announcer and film actor before serving as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989.Open the full entry for the first time in Geneva, Switzerland, where the two talked in a boathouse with only interpreters present. Between November 1985 and May 1988 they held four summit meetings, in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.⁠[5][4]

On October 11–12, 1986, they met at Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland, and came close to an agreement to eliminate medium-range missiles in Europe; the talks collapsed when Gorbachev insisted that the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry abandon its space-based missile defense plans, which Reagan refused.⁠[6][5]

During the Washington summit of December 8–10, 1987, Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in the East Room of the White House on December 8, eliminating ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,000 kilometers. The State Department’s Office of the Historian describes the treaty as eliminating an entire class of missiles in Europe and as a milestone in the history of the Cold War.⁠[5][6][4]

Reagan visited Moscow for a summit from May 29 to June 1, 1988, and on December 7, 1988, Gorbachev met Reagan and President-elect George H. W. BushGeorge H. W. BushGeorge H. W. Bush (1924–2018) was an American politician who served as a Navy pilot in World War II and worked in the oil business before holding posts including U.S. representative, ambassador to the United Nations and director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he was vice president from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993.Open the full entry on Governor’s Island in New York.⁠[6][5]

In 1988–89 Gorbachev oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, ending a nine-year occupation. Constitutional changes in December 1988 created a Congress of People’s Deputies, some of whose members were directly elected in contested elections; in 1989 the newly elected Congress formed a new Supreme Soviet, and Gorbachev became its chairman in May 1989.⁠[3]

Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in late 1989, and the Berlin Wall came down that year. Gorbachev tacitly accepted these changes and agreed to the phased withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.⁠[3][7]

In December 1989 Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush held a summit in Malta, meeting aboard the liner Maxim Gorky; they committed to resolving issues blocking agreements on strategic arms cuts, nuclear test limits and a global chemical weapons ban, and Bush proposed a full summit in the United States in late June of the following year.⁠[8]

On March 15, 1990, the Congress of People’s Deputies elected Gorbachev president of the Soviet Union with extensive executive powers. By the summer of 1990 he had agreed to the reunification of Germany.⁠[1][3]

On October 15, 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for Peace, unshared, “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations.”⁠[1][9]

On July 31, 1991, Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) at a public ceremony in St. Vladimir’s Hall in the Kremlin. The treaty provided for reductions over seven years, limiting each side to 1,600 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers and 6,000 accountable warheads.⁠[10][11]

After the Soviet Union dissolved, the United States, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan signed the Lisbon Protocol on May 23, 1992; the treaty entered into force on December 5, 1994, and expired on December 5, 2009.⁠[11]

From August 19 to 21, 1991, during a coup by hard-liners, Gorbachev and his family were held under house arrest; after the coup failed he resumed his duties, then resigned as general secretary and dissolved the party’s Central Committee.⁠[3][2]

On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, on the same day that the Soviet Union ceased to exist.⁠[3][1]

The Gorbachev Foundation was founded in December 1991 and began work in January 1992 as an international non-governmental, non-profit organization studying social, economic and political problems; Gorbachev was its president from January 1992.⁠[12][1]

In 1996 he was nominated as a candidate for the Russian presidency and, running against Boris Yeltsin, received less than 1% of the vote. Between 2001 and 2007 he founded the Russian United Social Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party of Russia, and in the fall of 2007 the public movement “The League of Social Democrats.”⁠[1][7]

From 1992 he published several dozen books in 10 languages, including Memoirs, issued five years after his resignation; for his 85th birthday in 2016 a 700-page collection of memoirs, interviews and documents was released.⁠[1][7]

Gorbachev died in Moscow on August 30, 2022, aged 91; the Central Clinical Hospital said he died “after a serious and long illness.” He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow next to his wife, Raisa. In December 2022 the Gorbachev Foundation was renamed the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies named after Mikhail S. Gorbachev.⁠[9][13][12]

Gorbachev and Raisa had a daughter, Irina, born on January 6, 1957. Raisa died in 1999; afterward Gorbachev campaigned for environmental causes and nuclear disarmament.⁠[1][7]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article judges Gorbachev “conspicuously successful” in dismantling the totalitarian aspects of the Soviet state and moving it toward representative democracy, but finds him less willing to free the economy from central control, so that the planned economy kept crumbling with no private enterprise to replace it. ABCABCABC (American Broadcasting Company) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It grew out of NBC’s Blue radio network, took its name after becoming independent in 1943, developed into a national television network after merging with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, was acquired by Capital Cities in 1985, and has been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. With CBS and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks, and it is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News observes that he was revered in the West for ending the Cold War but reviled at home for the collapse of the country and the bleak 1990s.⁠[3][7]

After his death U.S. President Joe Biden called him “a man of remarkable vision”; United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised him for changing the course of history; and Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed “deep condolences.”⁠[7][13]

Gorbachev Foundation: Official website: https://www.gorby.ru/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]