Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich

Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich (b. 2 Mar. 1931). General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1985–91 Born in Privolnoye near Stavropol (northern Caucasus) of a peasant family, the successful pupil and farm worker was sponsored by his local party to be educated at Moscow University in law and then at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute. He was active in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), and joined the Communist Party in 1952. He graduated from Moscow in 1955 with the highest marks, and returned to Stavropol, where he began a rapid rise within Komsomol and the regional Communist Party. In 1970, he had advanced to become regional first secretary of the party, and in 1971 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. There, he was noted not just for his intelligence, but also for his sternness and his reliability. In 1979, he became a non-voting member of the Politburo, and in 1980 a full member of the country's highest political body, in charge of agriculture. He failed to make a particular impact in this post, but instead, and more importantly, managed to become the protégé of Andropov. Under the latter, he became responsible for the entire economy. Though the more senior Chernenko was chosen in 1984 to succeed Andropov, he was able to expand his responsibilities to include party matters and ideology, as well as foreign policy Despite considerable opposition on account of his relative youth, he became leader of the party on 11 March 1985, with the crucial support of Gromyko. In marked contrast to his aged predecessors even in appearance, he used his early popularity to bring like-minded reformers into the Politburo within a few years, thus steadily increasing his own power base. He first concentrated his reformist efforts on foreign relations, where he replaced the long-serving Gromyko with his own protégé, Shevardnadze, as Foreign Minister in 1985. Relations with the USA, which had been at a low ebb since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, were dramatically improved, and he enjoyed more frequent meetings with a US President (i.e. Reagan and Bush) than any other Soviet leader.

Domestically, Gorbachev had a more difficult start, and his clumsy handling of the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 was still very much in line with his predecessors' grasp of public relations. In the summer of 1986, however, he embarked on his twin strategies to reform the Communist state, glasnost (opening) and perestroika (restructuring). Moreover, the Supreme Soviet, which used to lie dormant for most of the year, was given an enhanced role more like that of a parliament, whose members were chosen in contested elections (though they were still members of the Communist Party). With many of his old-guard opponents thus deselected, these reforms consolidated his own power. At the same time, his domestic popularity began to fall as the economic situation deteriorated. He had freed the economy of old regulations, but had shied away from drastic capitalist reform. As a result, the economy found itself in a state of limbo between the old Communist world and Western capitalism, an uncertainty that led to the worst of both worlds. He was also unsettled by the growth of nationalism among the different ethnic peoples of the Soviet Union, unleashed by glasnost. It was a development whose ferocity he had clearly not foreseen, as his violent repression of the independence movements of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) showed.

While he aroused the disappointed anger of radical reformers like Yeltsin, and the determined self-assertion of the country's national minorities, Gorbachev also angered hardliners and the military, partly through his reforms at home, but also because of their effects abroad. Having modelled their political systems closely upon that of the Soviet Union for forty years, it became impossible for the Eastern European hardline leaders such as Honecker or Husák to prevent demands for glasnost and perestroika in their own countries, hard though they tried. In contrast to its previous role, the Soviet Army was forced to stand by idly as the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1988–9. His promotion of peaceful political transition in Eastern Europe brought him the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in succession to people like Sakharov and Walesa; to the military and Communist hardliners, this was the final confirmation of a world gone mad.

Gorbachev's dependence on Yeltsin to break the August coup revealed the true decline of his popularity. It was Yeltsin who negotiated the breakup of the USSR into the CIS, which undermined Gorbachev's function as head of state of the USSR. He resigned on 25 December 1991, a week before the USSR ceased to exist. Thereafter, he continued to enjoy popularity in the West on numerous lecture tours, but his bad showing in the 1996 Russian presidential elections, in which he gained 0.51 per cent of the popular vote, was another confirmation of his genuine domestic unpopularity.