Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose efforts to shake up the country’s economic and political systems led to the collapse of the Communist superpower and the end of the Cold War, has died. He was 91 years old.
The state-run Interfax and Tass news services cited the Moscow hospital where Gorbachev died. According to Tass, the Central Clinical Hospital said his death was due to “a serious and prolonged illness”.
Gorbachev pushed for radical changes to the Soviet economy after he became leader of the Communist Party in 1985, at the age of 54. His overhaul, known as perestroika, and open policy , or glasnost, ushered in a political avalanche that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ended Soviet rule two years later.
Gorbachev’s career fell apart in the process, leaving him sidelined with Russia’s political and economic development. In his farewell speech broadcast on national television on December 25, 1991, the day the Soviet Union and his presidency were officially dissolved, Gorbachev said he had no regrets.
“I understand that initiating reforms on such a large scale in a society like ours is the most difficult and risky undertaking,” he said. “But even now, I still believe that the democratic reforms that began in the spring of 1985 are historically justifiable.”
Until Gorbachev’s time, most Kremlinologists predicted that the Soviet system, a one-party state that governed all aspects of public life, would be dismantled only through civil war. . Gorbachev, who could recognize a red birthmark on his bald head, paved the way for the disintegration of the Soviet state. This has resulted in relatively little violence in Russia, with unrest mostly confined to conflicts in regions including Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Moldova.
Undesirable consequences
“The biggest undesirable result of all was the disintegration of the Soviet Union,” Archie Brown, professor emeritus of politics at Oxford University and author of “Seven Years Changing the World: Perestroika Perspective,” wrote in 2010. “In 1988, Gorbachev became conscious of the fact that destroy the Soviet system. At no time did he want to see the disappearance of the Soviet state.”
Gorbachev’s popularity was dwindling even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, partly because the population suffered from the weakness of the country’s centrally planned economy made worse by low oil prices. . The years that followed were especially difficult. The Russian economy shrank by nearly 40% between 1990 and 1997, on par with the US recession of the 1930s.
“Gorbachev was the man who brought about both change and trouble,” says Andrei Grachev, a former advisor to Gorbachev and author of “Gorbachev,” a biography published in Russian in 2001.
Stalin’s Legacy
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 into a peasant family in the Stavropol region, southern Russia. Two of his grandfathers were detained during the persecutions carried out under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
In 1950, he won a place at Moscow University, the country’s most prestigious educational institution, where he completed his law degree and met his future wife Raisa Titorenko.
Gorbachev progressed through the Communist Party. By 1970, he was the highest-ranking party official of Stavropol, the Soviet Union’s youngest regional boss. In 1978, he went to Moscow as secretary of the national party committee in charge of agriculture.
Two years later, Gorbachev became the youngest official member of the Politburo, the seat of power in the Soviet Union, where he was joined by former KGB police chief Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader in 1982.
While Gorbachev was transferred to the highest job after Andropov’s death in 1984, he was exposed abroad with public trips to the United Kingdom and Italy.
Follow Chernenko
“I like Mr. Gorbachev,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said after his visit. “We can do business together.”
In 1985, Gorbachev assumed the position of general secretary of the Communist Party after Konstantin Chernenko, Andropov’s successor, died a year in the job. He said his original goals were not revolutionary.
He wrote in 1988, referring to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917: “We, myself included, say that perestroika is a continuation of October. “I and most people share the illusion that we can achieve our goals by perfecting the existing system.”
Gorbachev called for greater transparency, or glasnost, to open up the secrets of Soviet history and restore broader political debate after seven decades of authoritarian control.
Early capitalists
Economically, Gorbachev gave local factory managers more power and allowed the creation of “cooperatives,” which became the incubator for Russia’s first capitalists.
Gorbachev’s first major crisis occurred on April 26, 1986, when an explosion occurred at a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The reported and delayed response to the accident revealed the flaws of the Soviet secret system.
“Chernobyl shed light on many problems of our system as a whole,” Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs.
In December 1986, the Soviet leader broke with the past by allowing the release of Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident scientist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner, living in exile. in the Russian city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod.
Banned books including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Islands” have been published in magazines, selling millions of copies. Citizens are allowed to travel to the West more freely.
Nobel Prize
Outside the Soviet Union, Gorbachev met US President Ronald Reagan in Geneva in 1985, Reykjavik in 1986, and a year later in Washington, where he signed the treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Together with Reagan, Gorbachev developed the US-Soviet relationship, and his efforts to promote East-West reconciliation helped him achieve Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
By May 1989, change was sweeping the republics of the Soviet Union. There have been ethnic clashes in Uzbekistan and Georgia, the Baltic states claim their sovereignty, and Azerbaijan is in the early stages of a war with Armenia.
On 9 November of that year, the Berlin Wall was demolished, and one by one the members of the Warsaw Pact of satellite states in Eastern Europe withdrew from the Soviet orbit.
At home, Gorbachev tried to balance old defenses with new leaders like Boris Yeltsin, who pushed for deeper, faster change and ultimately broke with the Communist Party. Party hardliners like Yegor Ligachev see Gorbachev as a traitor.
The End of Communism
In August 1991, a group of conservative Communists staged a coup to prevent the signing of a treaty on relations between the republics that they believed would mean the end of the Soviet Union. Centralized Soviet Union. Gorbachev is under house arrest at his summer villa in Crimea. In Moscow, Yeltsin rallied popular support and repelled the conspirators, effectively putting Gorbachev out.
In December 1991, Yeltsin signed an agreement with the leaders of the republics of Ukraine and Belarus for the burial of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Gorbachev’s presidential office.
While Gorbachev remains a sought-after speaker on Western lectures, he appears only rarely in Russian public life. When he ran for president in June 1996, he won less than 1% of the vote.
“There is a contrast between views about him from inside and outside Russia,” Grachev said in an interview. “Ultimately, it is Russian society that has to pay the full cost of the transition, while the West can reap the benefits.”
Gorbachev’s wife died of leukemia in 1999 at a hospital in Muenster, Germany. Her illness brought a rare wave of sympathy for Gorbachev, whose devotion to Raisa earned him the respect of ordinary Russians.
Critic Putin
Gorbachev was disillusioned with Russia’s future under President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel who succeeded Yeltsin on New Year’s Eve 1999 and once described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the world.” 20th century”.
Gorbachev publicly criticized the Russian leader for the first time in 2011, urging him not to seek a third presidential term. Putin won another six years in the Kremlin in 2012 after facing unprecedented protests and was re-elected to a fourth term in 2018.
“If you try to do everything in the country without taking into account the people, while at the same time mimicking democracy, that will lead to a situation like in Africa, where leaders sit and rule for 20 or 30 years,” Gorbachev told Bloomberg News.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, lashed out at Gorbachev in 2011, hailing the Brezhnev era as a “big plus” for the country. Brezhnev ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982.
The Gorbachev Foundation released a statement in the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that “we affirm the need for an early cessation of hostilities and an immediate start of negotiations.” peace. There is nothing more precious in the world than a human life.”
Poll results
Gorbachev’s status in the West was marked by his 80th birthday celebration at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2011. Sharon Stone and Kevin Spacey hosted a four-and-a-half-hour event that included words tribute to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bono and Sting.
In Russia, a survey published in March 2010 by an independent polling company found that 76% of respondents held a hostile or indifferent attitude towards Gorbachev. Forty-five percent want to go back to the Soviet era before his perestroika, the same poll found.
However, many Russians are middle-class, especially in Moscow and St. until the war in Ukraine.
“In every society, from ancient Greece, where Socrates was condemned with a cup of poison, there are people who are far beyond society in their thinking,” said Russian journalist Alexander Lebedev, who, along with Gorbachev, supported the paper. investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, said in a September 2012 interview. “Most Russians probably still think that Stalin was a good thing for the country. They’re lucky they don’t have to put up with that.”
Gorbachev and Raisa have a daughter, Irina, who is appointed vice president of The Gorbachev Foundationan independent policy research organization in Moscow.
