Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was the last General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the only Soviet president, man whose decisions made the peaceful end of the Cold War possible. He came to power in March 1985 promising to fix a system that had stopped working. By the time he resigned on December 25, 1991, the system he had tried to save no longer existed. The historian Archie Brown, in The Gorbachev Factor (1996), argued that Gorbachev’s personality, judgment, and willingness to take risks made the difference; the pressure for change was structural, but the form change took was not. Few scholars now dispute the claim.
The Making of a Soviet Leader
Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in Privolnoye, in the Stavropol krai of southern Russia. Both his grandfathers had been deported to Siberia in the 1930s under Stalin’s dekulakization; both returned. He joined the Komsomol in 1946 and the Communist Party in 1952, the year Stalin died. At Moscow State University he met Raisa Titarenko, whom he married in 1953 and who remained his closest political adviser for the next four decades.
Gorbachev rose through the Stavropol party organization, becoming first secretary in 1970. He caught the attention of Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, who brought him to Moscow in 1978. Andropov’s death in February 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko’s death on March 10, 1985 cleared the way. The next day the Politburo elected him General Secretary. He was 54, two decades younger than Brezhnev at the time of his takeover.
The Logic of Reform
Gorbachev did not set out to end the Soviet Union. He set out to save it. The economy had been stagnating since the mid-1970s. Growth had slowed from a 1950s average of more than 5 percent a year to roughly 2 percent by the early 1980s. Life expectancy for Soviet men had fallen by roughly three years between 1965 and 1985, a regression without peacetime parallel in an industrialized country. The war in Afghanistan (1979–1989) was costing the treasury an estimated $3–5 billion a year and producing roughly 15,000 Soviet dead. The technology gap with the West was widening in computing, telecommunications, and biotechnology.
The diagnosis drove the prescription. Perestroika was meant to revive the economy by allowing limited market forces, profit retention by enterprises, and the entry of foreign capital. Glasnost was meant to make the system honest enough to identify and correct its own failures. Demokratizatsiya — Gorbachev’s third, less remembered banner — was meant to bring genuine participation into a political system that had been hollowed out by decades of rubber-stamp elections.
Perestroika: The Economic Reform
The first major economic law, the Law on State Enterprises, came in 1987. It freed managers from detailed central planning, allowed them to keep a share of profits, and let prices fluctuate within bands. Cooperatives were legalized in 1988; joint ventures with foreign firms became possible the same year. The 500 Days program, drafted by Grigory Yavlinsky and Stanislav Shushkevich in 1990, sketched a far more radical transition to a market economy; Gorbachev backed away from it under pressure from the conservative wing of the Politburo.
The results were disastrous. The partial liberalization of prices without genuine competition produced shortages and inflation; the legalization of cooperatives turned into a vehicle for black-market operators and party insiders to extract rents from state assets. By 1990 the fiscal deficit had reached an estimated 10–20 percent of GDP.
Glasnost: The Information Revolution
Glasnost moved faster than perestroika. The weekly news program Vzglyad (View), launched in October 1987 on Central Television, became a sensation by showing what the old channels had not: footage of alcoholism, drug use, pollution, the war in Afghanistan. Andrei Sakharov returned from internal exile in Gor’kii in December 1986 and was allowed to publish. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, never before printed in the Soviet Union, was serialized in Novy Mir beginning in 1989.
The disclosures were corrosive. Soviet citizens learned for the first time the scale of Stalin’s terror: roughly 700,000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937–38 alone. They learned the terms of the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. The Baltic republics discovered that their incorporation in 1940 had been the product of that protocol, not of any voluntary act on their part. As Brown has written, glasnost destroyed the moral authority of the Communist Party faster than perestroika destroyed the economy.
New Thinking in Foreign Policy
Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, was eased out in 1985 and replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, a Georgian party boss with no foreign policy experience. Shevardnadze and his key aide, Anatoly Chernyaev, came to share Gorbachev’s conviction that the arms race was bankrupting the country.
The turning point was the Reykjavik summit of October 11–12, 1986. Reagan and Gorbachev came close to agreeing on the total elimination of nuclear weapons and missed the deal by, among other things, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Out of the failure came the INF Treaty, signed in Washington on December 8, 1987: the first agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons (ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers). About 2,700 missiles were destroyed by the treaty’s deadline of May 1991.
The capstone was Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations on December 7, 1988. He announced unilateral cuts of 500,000 in Soviet military personnel, the withdrawal of six tank divisions from Eastern Europe, and — most consequentially — the right of the peoples of Eastern Europe to choose their own political systems. The Brezhnev Doctrine was dead. When a Western reporter asked Gerasimov whether he really meant the Soviet Union would not intervene, the spokesman quipped that the USSR now followed Frank Sinatra — each country would do it its way.
Domestic Politics and the Road to 1991
Gorbachev’s reforms created the political space in which his opponents organized. The Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in March 1989, included sharp critics from across the political spectrum. Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev had sacked as Moscow party chief in 1987, won 89 percent of the Moscow vote. In March 1990 Gorbachev was elected by the Congress to a new post, President of the Soviet Union, and the article of the Soviet constitution guaranteeing the Communist Party’s leading role was repealed. In June 1990 Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian SFSR.
The new union treaty that Gorbachev hoped to sign in August 1991 was preempted by the August 19 coup. The State Committee on the State of Emergency, led by eight officials including the heads of the KGB, the Interior Ministry, and the Defense Ministry, declared Gorbachev ill and ordered tanks into Moscow. Yeltsin, in the Russian White House, denounced the coup. The conspirators never issued coherent orders; by the morning of August 21 they were flying back to Moscow in retreat.
The Resignation
Gorbachev held on for four more months. On December 25, 1991, he appeared on Soviet television and resigned. His words were measured:
“Dear compatriots, due to the situation that has developed in connection with the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am discontinuing my activities as President of the Soviet Union. The position is open to mutual coordination in the framework of the Commonwealth. I am doing this out of considerations of principle. I firmly hold to the conviction that the destinies of our peoples and the common interests of the security of Europe and the world require that a policy be pursued, not on the basis of ambitions, but on the basis of reason, common sense, and openness.”
The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin at 7:32 p.m. The next day the Soviet of the Republics voted itself out of existence. Gorbachev was 60.
Legacy
Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. His reforms also brought the Soviet Union to a collapse that produced economic catastrophe in the 1990s and, in the long run, the resentments that have shaped the politics of Russia under Vladimir Putin. What is not in dispute is that no other Soviet leader would have made the choices he made in 1988 and 1989, and that those choices, for a few years at least, kept Europe at peace.
Key sources
- Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford University Press, 1996). The standard biography of Gorbachev, written by the doyen of British Soviet specialists.
- Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021). Brilliant on the way the Soviet elite destroyed the system from within.
- Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (Doubleday, 1996). Useful as a primary source and a study in self-justification.
- Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2001). Short, sharp, skeptical of the inevitability thesis.