Who was Mikhail Gorbachev?

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union and the figure most directly responsible for the peaceful end of the Cold War, serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from March 11, 1985 to August 24, 1991, and as President of the Soviet Union from March 1990 to December 25, 1991. Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia. He grew up under Stalin and survived German occupation as a child during World War II. He studied law at Moscow State University, where he met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, and rose through the Communist Party in the agricultural Stavropol region. He became a member of the Politburo in 1980 and General Secretary at age 54 after the deaths of three elderly predecessors in quick succession.

Gorbachev introduced two transformative reform policies. Glasnost, meaning openness, eased censorship, allowed criticism of past Soviet history including the crimes of Joseph Stalin, and permitted contested elections at the local level. Perestroika, meaning restructuring, attempted to revive the planned economy by allowing limited private enterprise and decentralizing decision-making.

He pursued breakthroughs in arms control with the United States. He met President Ronald Reagan four times between 1985 and 1988, including the Reykjavik summit of October 1986 where they came close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. They signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington on December 8, 1987, eliminating an entire class of nuclear missiles. He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan between 1988 and 1989 and renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine that had justified intervention in other communist states.

When Eastern European governments fell in the autumn of 1989, Gorbachev refused to send tanks. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War peacefully.

Gorbachev's reforms inadvertently fueled nationalist movements in the Soviet republics, leading to the August 1991 coup attempt by hardliners and his eventual resignation on December 25, 1991. The Soviet Union dissolved the next day. Gorbachev later founded a foundation in Moscow, became a critic of post-Soviet Russian politics, and died on August 30, 2022, at age 91.