Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, a farming village in Stavropol territory. His family history was the history of the Soviet peasantry itself: both grandfathers were arrested in the 1930s, and as a boy he lived under German occupation. At sixteen he drove a combine beside his father and won the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, which, with his grades, carried him into the law faculty of Moscow State University. There he met Raisa, his lifelong partner, and befriended the Czechoslovak student Zdenek Mlynar, later a protagonist of the Prague Spring.

Back home after graduation he climbed the Komsomol and party ladder steadily, becoming first secretary of the Stavropol regional party in 1970, at thirty-nine. Stavropol was spa country where the leadership came to rest, and there he caught the eye of Suslov, Kosygin and, decisively, Andropov. In 1978 he came to Moscow as Central Committee secretary for agriculture; in 1980, at forty-nine, he became a full Politburo member, the youngest by nearly twenty years in a Politburo of old men.

Andropov, from his sickbed, wanted him chairing meetings; under Chernenko he was de facto second secretary, handling ideology and personnel. In a December 1984 speech he was already trying out words like glasnost and the human factor. When power came to him he looked prepared, though what exactly he meant to do, even he did not yet fully know.

On 11 March 1985, the day after Chernenko's death, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU. In an era of successive funerals for aged leaders, his youth was itself a promise of change. Born to a peasant family in Stavropol, a combine operator's assistant who graduated in law from Moscow State University, he was a typical son of the Soviet generation, risen to the summit of the party apparatus.

His reforms were meant not to abandon socialism but to revive it. Under the slogan of more socialism and more democracy, he set out to shake a stagnant economy and an ossified politics awake through perestroika, restructuring, and glasnost, openness. After the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 showed the price of bureaucratic concealment, glasnost grew bolder: censorship loosened, the repressions of the Stalin era entered public debate, and in 1989 a Congress of People's Deputies was formed through the first competitive elections in Soviet history.

Abroad, he proclaimed the New Thinking and pursued an end to the arms race. The INF Treaty of 1987 brought the first actual reduction of nuclear weapons in a generation, and in 1989 Soviet troops left Afghanistan. When upheaval swept Eastern Europe that year, he refused to intervene by force.

Glasnost began as an instrument of rule: public scrutiny would police bureaucratic sloth and corruption and serve as a lever of reform. But after Chernobyl in April 1986 showed the price of concealment, openness spread uncontrollably from the present to the past, from the economy to history. Abuladze's film Repentance was released; Akhmatova's Requiem, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Grossman's Life and Fate appeared in print in turn. Journal subscriptions leapt by the million, and people read thick literary monthlies on the metro, learning their country's history for the first time.

In 1987 the rehabilitation of Stalin-era victims resumed, and a commission under Yakovlev cleared Bukharin and other old defendants one after another. In March 1988 the schoolteacher Nina Andreyeva's letter, I cannot forsake principles, became the signal for a conservative counterattack that froze the country for three weeks, but Gorbachev answered with a rebuttal in Pravda and held the line. In June 1990 a press law abolished censorship outright.

Glasnost was Gorbachev's surest success and the reform that cost him most. Truth set people free, but much of that truth concerned the party's own history. Historians judge that, with no economic gains to match, openness ate away at the legitimacy of the system itself. Gorbachev said to the end that he did not regret it.

In March 1990 Gorbachev became the first president of the USSR, but by vote of the Congress of People's Deputies rather than direct election, a choice historians count among his decisive errors: his authority would forever bow before that of the popularly elected Yeltsin. That same month Lithuania declared independence, and by summer the republics, Russia included, were declaring sovereignty one after another in what the newspapers called the parade of sovereignties.

In the autumn he tacked between the radical 500 Days programme and his government's plan until the moment for reform was lost. In October he was named Nobel Peace laureate, at the very time the queues outside shops were the longest since the war; rarely has a leader's honour abroad so diverged from want at home. As winter came he turned right, promoting hardliners such as Kryuchkov, Pavlov and Yanayev, and in December Shevardnadze resigned with the warning that dictatorship is coming.

In January 1991 Soviet troops seized the Vilnius television tower and fourteen people died. Gorbachev denied giving the order; responsibility was never established, and the democrats turned away from him. When the March referendum returned 76 percent for preserving the union, he staked everything on his last card: negotiation of a new union treaty with the republic leaders, the Novo-Ogaryovo process.

20 August 1991 was to be the signing day of the new union treaty, which handed most powers except defence and foreign affairs to the republics; to the hardliners it read as the union's death warrant. On the afternoon of 18 August, uninvited visitors came to the presidential dacha at Foros in Crimea, where Gorbachev was on holiday, demanding he consent to a state of emergency. He refused; the lines were cut, and he was confined with his family for three days while in Moscow the State Committee for the State of Emergency declared it had taken power.

The coup collapsed within three days, but returning to Moscow on 22 August Gorbachev said he had come back to a different country. Real power had passed to Yeltsin, now the symbol of resistance, who humiliated him on live television by making him read out the decree suspending the Russian Communist Party from the rostrum of the Russian parliament. On 24 August Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary and advised the Central Committee to dissolve itself. So ended the party he had meant to revive.

Through the autumn he fought to revive the union treaty, but on 1 December Ukraine's referendum chose independence overwhelmingly, cutting the last thread. When the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the union extinct at Belovezha on 8 December, nothing remained to the president of the USSR but to settle the form of his own departure.

The reforms escaped his hands. Partial measures dismantled the coordinating functions of the planned economy without building those of a market, and the shop shelves emptied. Glasnost unsealed the national question, and conflict flared in Karabakh, the Baltics, and the Caucasus. In the referendum of 17 March 1991, 76 percent of voters in the participating republics chose to preserve the union, but the political instruments for preserving it were already dissolving.

The coup attempt of August 1991 was made by men Gorbachev himself had appointed, and its failure brought down together the party and the union he had tried to save. When the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared the union dissolved in the Belovezha forest on 8 December, he had no strength left to stop them. On the evening of 25 December he announced his resignation as president, and that night the red flag over the Kremlin came down.

In the West, Gorbachev was celebrated as the leader who ended the Cold War without bloodshed. The price paid by Soviet citizens, however, was terrible: in the 1990s Russia's GDP nearly halved, male life expectancy plunged, and tens of millions fell overnight into poverty or statelessness. His legacy is the gulf between a sincere attempt to save socialism and the catastrophe that attempt produced. He died in Moscow on 30 August 2022.

Gorbachev lived thirty more years after leaving office. He founded a foundation to defend perestroika, became a shareholder of the persecuted newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and suffered the humiliation of 0.5 percent in the 1996 presidential election. In the West he was feted as the man who freed Europe and lifted the fear of nuclear war; at home he was often named the man who wrecked the empire and brought on the miseries of the 1990s. Few figures of the twentieth century are judged so differently on either side of a border.

Scholarly verdicts divide too. Archie Brown sees a reformer bred by the system who grew beyond it and chose democratisation in earnest; Stephen Kotkin argues that the very attempt to reform an unreformable system produced the collapse. Yet neither side denies certain facts: he avoided mass bloodshed in the dismantling of an empire, and refused to the end the temptation to call in the tanks to keep power. His own summary was this: the reforms had to begin, and I defend perestroika to this day.

He died on 30 August 2022, at ninety-one, as war raged in Ukraine and the age of confrontation he had tried to end seemed to have returned. There was no state funeral; the master of the Kremlin sent a short telegram instead of attending. He was buried at Novodevichy, beside Raisa.