Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in the village of Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, into a peasant family of mixed Russian and Ukrainian heritage in Stalin's Soviet Union. His maternal grandfather chaired the local collective farm; his paternal grandfather had been imprisoned in a labour camp from 1934 to 1938 on sabotage charges, and his accounts of torture by the secret police left a lasting impression on the young Gorbachev. The German Army occupied his village for four and a half months in 1942. At fourteen he began operating a combine harvester alongside his father; in 1948 they brought in over 800 tonnes of grain, an achievement for which the eighteen-year-old Gorbachev received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, helping him enter Moscow State University's law faculty without an entrance examination in 1950. He joined the Communist Party in 1952 and married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953.

A committed reformer after Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, he climbed the regional Party ladder, becoming First Secretary of the Stavropol Krai Committee in 1970. In 1978 he returned to Moscow as Central Committee Secretary for agriculture, and in 1980 he became the Politburo's youngest full member. The successive deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko thrust him forward; during a December 1984 visit to London, Margaret Thatcher famously declared, "I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together."

Gorbachev was elected General Secretary on 11 March 1985 at age 54, ending a procession of elderly leaders. Andrei Gromyko's nominating speech famously praised his charm but warned, "comrades, this man has a nice smile but he has iron teeth". He moved swiftly, appointing Eduard Shevardnadze as foreign minister and Nikolai Ryzhkov as premier. The April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and his fury at official cover-ups, helped institutionalise glasnost (openness). He labelled his programme perestroika (restructuring), legalised individual enterprise and cooperatives, and signed the 1987 State Enterprise Law to introduce limited market mechanisms into the planned economy.

His foreign policy transformed superpower relations. Four summits with President Reagan - Geneva 1985, Reykjavík 1986, Washington 1987, Moscow 1988 - produced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December 1987, the first arms-control agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons. He began withdrawing Soviet forces from Afghanistan in May 1988, completed by February 1989. The same year, as one communist regime after another collapsed in Eastern Europe, he replaced the Brezhnev Doctrine of military intervention with what was nicknamed the "Sinatra Doctrine" - each country could go its own way. He did not block the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 or German reunification in October 1990; for these achievements he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. He became chairman of the Supreme Soviet's Presidium (head of state) in 1988 and the first - and only - President of the USSR in March 1990.

Domestic policy was less successful and more divisive. Perestroika lacked a clear roadmap from planned to market economy; shortages, inflation, and supply-chain breakdown deepened. On nationality questions he oscillated. In April 1989 Soviet troops killed 21 civilians at a peaceful rally in Tbilisi, Georgia; January 1990 brought the suppression of unrest in Baku, Azerbaijan, with hundreds killed; and on 13 January 1991 a Soviet army-Spetsnaz operation in Vilnius killed 14 Lithuanians in the Bloody Sunday. Gorbachev later called these moments his deepest regrets, but they left lasting distrust in the Baltic states and the Caucasus. After 1989 the elected Congress of People's Deputies eroded one-party rule and conservatives grew alarmed; Shevardnadze resigned dramatically in December 1990, warning that "a dictatorship is approaching".

On 19 August 1991 hardliners - Vice-President Yanayev, KGB chairman Kryuchkov, Defence Minister Yazov and others - placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his Crimean dacha and announced a coup. Boris Yeltsin, addressing crowds from atop a tank outside the Russian parliament, rallied resistance; the coup collapsed within three days, but Yeltsin had emerged as the dominant figure. On 8 December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords creating the Commonwealth of Independent States and effectively dissolving the USSR. On 25 December Gorbachev resigned as Soviet President, and that evening the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, ending seventy-four years of Soviet history.

In retirement he founded the Gorbachev Foundation in 1992 and supported Russian social democracy, criticising both the oligarch class and the destruction of social safety nets. He ran for president in 1996 but received only 0.5 percent of the vote. He initially endorsed the 2014 annexation of Crimea but turned critical of the war in Ukraine. He died in Moscow on 30 August 2022 at age 91. President Putin declined to attend the funeral, denied him a full state funeral, and offered only a brief mourning. Western leaders attended in force on a cold day. In the West Gorbachev remains the Nobel laureate who ended the Cold War without bloodshed; in Russia he is often viewed as the leader who lost a superpower and triggered the chaos of the 1990s. His own assessment - "I tried to save my country, and instead I destroyed it", as the Russian public has often paraphrased - and the Western verdict that he pulled humanity back from the nuclear brink, leave his place in history hanging between the two.