Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a Soviet and Russian politician who was the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985, and additionally as head of state from 1988. Ideologically, he initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism, but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s.
Born in Privolnoye, North Caucasus Krai, into a peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, Gorbachev grew up under the rule of Joseph Stalin. In his youth, Gorbachev operated combine harvesters on a collective farm, before joining the Communist Party, which then governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state. Studying at Moscow State University, he married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953 and received 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.
Gorbachev was appointed the first party secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, overseeing the construction of the Great Stavropol Canal. In 1978, Gorbachev returned to Moscow to become a secretary of the party's Central Committee. He joined the governing Politburo as a non-voting member the following year and as a voting member in 1980. Three years after the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as general secretary.
Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and its Marxist–Leninist principles, Gorbachev believed significant reform was necessary for its survival. He withdrew troops 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, Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and demokratizatsiya allowed for enhanced freedom of speech and the press, while his perestroika sought to decentralize economic decision-making to improve its efficiency. Ultimately, his democratization measures and formation of the elected Congress of People's Deputies undermined the one-party state. When various Warsaw Pact countries abandoned Marxist–Leninist governance in 1989, he declined to intervene militarily. Growing nationalist sentiment within constituent republics threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading hardliners within the party to launch an unsuccessful coup against him in August 1991. In the coup's wake, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes. After resigning from the presidency, he launched the Gorbachev Foundation, became a vocal critic of Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and campaigned for Russia's social-democratic movement.
Considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century, Gorbachev remains controversial. The recipient of a wide range of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, he was praised for his 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 German reunification. Critics see him as weakening Russia's global influence and precipitating an economic collapse in the country.
Early life and education
1931–1950: Childhood and adolescence
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, a selo in the present-day Krasnogvardeysky District of the Stavropol Krai of Russia. At the time, Privolnoye was part of the North Caucasus Krai in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, and was divided between Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. Gorbachev's paternal family were Russians and had moved from Voronezh several generations before, while his maternal family were ethnic Ukrainians and had migrated from Chernigov. Gorbachev's parents, Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev and Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva, named him Viktor at birth. However, at Maria's insistence, Gorbachev had a secret baptism, where Sergey's father christened him Mikhail. Gorbachev's relationship with Sergey was close, while Maria was cold and punitive. Sergey and Maria were poor and lived as peasants. The couple married as teenagers in 1928. In keeping with local tradition, they initially resided in the house of Sergey's father, an adobe-walled hut, before a hut of their own could be built.The Soviet Union was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party, led by Joseph Stalin. Stalin had initiated a project of mass rural collectivization meant to help convert the country into a socialist society. Maria's father joined the Communist Party in 1928 and helped form Privolnoye's first kolkhoz the following year, becoming its chair. It was outside Privolnoye. At the age of three, Gorbachev left his parental home and moved into the kolkhoz with Maria's parents.
Two of Gorbachev's paternal uncles and an aunt died in the famine of 1930–1933. This was followed by the Great Purge, in which individuals accused of being "enemies of the people" were interned in labor camps or executed. Both of Gorbachev's grandfathers served time in labor camps. After his December 1938 release, Maria's father discussed having been tortured by the secret police, an account that influenced Gorbachev.
During the Second World War, the German Army started invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, and occupied Privolnoye for four and a half months the following year. Sergey fought on the frontlines; he was wrongly declared dead during the war and fought in the 1943 Battle of Kursk before returning to his family, injured. Following the war, Sergey and Maria had their second son, Aleksandr, in 1947; Gorbachev and Aleksandr were the couple's only children.
The school in Privolnoye was closed during much of the war, re-opening in autumn 1944. Gorbachev did not want to return but excelled academically when he did. He read voraciously, moving from the Western novels of Thomas Mayne Reid to the works of Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Mikhail Lermontov. In 1946, Gorbachev joined the Komsomol, the Soviet political youth organization, becoming leader of his local group, and was then elected to the Komsomol committee for the district. From primary school, he moved to the high school in Molotovskoye; he stayed there during the week and walked the home during weekends. As well as being a member of the school's drama society, Gorbachev organized sporting and social activities, and led the school's morning exercise class. Over the course of five consecutive summers starting with 1946, he returned home to assist Sergey in operating a combine harvester; they sometimes worked 20 hours a day during those summers. In 1948, they harvested over of grain, a feat for which Sergey was awarded the Order of Lenin; and Gorbachev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
1950–1955: University
In June 1950, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party. He applied to study at the law school of Moscow State University, then the most prestigious university in the country. They accepted him without asking for an exam, likely because of his worker-peasant origins and his possession of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. His choice of law was unusual; it was not a well-regarded subject in Soviet society at that time. At age 19, he traveled by train to Moscow, the first time he had left his home region.In Moscow, Gorbachev resided with fellow MSU students at a dormitory in the Sokolniki District. He felt at odds with his urban counterparts, but soon came to fit in. Fellow students recall his working especially hard, often late into the night. He gained a reputation as a mediator during disputes and was outspoken in class, but was private about his views; for instance, he confided in some students his opposition to the Soviet jurisprudential norm that a confession proved guilt, noting that confessions could have been forced. During his studies, an antisemitic campaign spread through the Soviet Union, culminating in the Doctors' plot; Gorbachev publicly defended Volodya Liberman, a Jewish student accused of disloyalty.
At MSU, Gorbachev became the Komsomol head of his entering class, and then Komsomol's deputy secretary for agitation and propaganda at the law school. One of his first Komsomol assignments in Moscow was to monitor the election polling in Presnensky District to ensure near-total turnout; Gorbachev found that most people voted "out of fear". In 1952, he was appointed a full member of the Communist Party. He was tasked with monitoring fellow students for subversion; some of his fellow students said he did so only minimally and that they trusted him to keep confidential information secret from the authorities. Gorbachev became close friends with Zdeněk Mlynář, a Czechoslovak student who later became a primary ideologist of the 1968 Prague Spring. Mlynář recalled that the duo remained committed Marxist–Leninists despite their growing concerns about the Stalinist system. After Stalin died in March 1953, Gorbachev and Mlynář joined the crowds massing to see Stalin's body lying in state.
At MSU, Gorbachev met Raisa Titarenko, who was studying in the university's philosophy department. She was engaged to another man, but after that engagement fell apart, she began a relationship with Gorbachev; together they went to bookstores, museums, and art exhibits. In early 1953, he took an internship at the procurator's office in Molotovskoye district, but he was angered by the incompetence and arrogance of those working there. That summer, he returned to Privolnoye to work with his father on the harvest; the money earned allowed him to pay for his wedding. On 25 September 1953, he and Raisa registered their marriage at Sokolniki Registry Office, and in October, moved in together at the Lenin Hills dormitory. Raisa discovered that she was pregnant and although the couple wanted to keep the child she fell ill and required an abortion.
In June 1955, Gorbachev graduated with a distinction; his final paper had been on the advantages of "socialist democracy" over "bourgeois democracy". He was subsequently assigned to the Soviet Procurator's office, which was focusing on the rehabilitation of the innocent victims of Stalin's purges, but found that they had no work for him. He was then offered a place on an MSU graduate course specializing in kolkhoz law, but declined. He had wanted to remain in Moscow, where Raisa was enrolled in a PhD program, but instead gained employment in Stavropol; Raisa abandoned her studies to join him there.