Who was the man who ended the Cold War without a shot, then watched his own country disappear within seven years? Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1931–2022), the last leader of the Soviet Union. He served as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from March 11, 1985 to August 24, 1991, and as the first and last President of the Soviet Union from March 15, 1990 until his resignation on December 25, 1991. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War.
Archie Brown, the Oxford political scientist who wrote the standard biography, argues in The Gorbachev Factor (1996) that Gorbachev’s personality and his willingness to take political risks account for the peaceful end of the Cold War. Other scholars — most recently Vladislav Zubok in Collapse (2021) — give more weight to the structural weakness of the Soviet system. The two interpretations are not incompatible, but they lead to different judgments of Gorbachev’s responsibility for the collapse.
Early Life
Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in Privolnoye, a small village in the Stavropol krai of southern Russia. His family, like most peasant families in the region, had been collectivized; both his grandfathers had been deported as kulaks in the 1930s. The experience gave Gorbachev an unusually direct acquaintance with the human cost of Stalinism, a point he returned to in his memoirs.
He studied at Moscow State University from 1950 to 1955, the first in his village to receive a higher education. He joined the Communist Party in 1952, before Stalin’s death. At MSU he met Raisa Titarenko, a philosophy student from Rubtsovsk; they married in 1953 and remained together until her death in 1999. The marriage was unusually public for a Soviet leader. Raisa Gorbacheva became a political figure in her own right, addressed universities, and refused the role of the silent party wife. Foreign observers found her unusual; party conservatives found her unsettling.
The Stavropol Years
Gorbachev returned to Stavropol after university and rose through the regional party organization. He became first secretary of the Stavropol kraikom in 1970, at the age of 39. Stavropol was an agricultural region in the North Caucasus, and Gorbachev’s portfolio included agriculture, a notoriously difficult beat. He became the youngest member of the Politburo in 1980.
He was a protégé of Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and General Secretary from November 1982 to February 1984. Andropov, a serious reformer by Soviet standards, was the first post-Stalin leader to consider that the system needed fundamental change. He did not live long enough to act. Konstantin Chernenko, an aging Brezhnev loyalist, succeeded Andropov and died on March 10, 1985. The next day the Politburo elected Gorbachev General Secretary. He was 54, the first Soviet leader born after the revolution.
The Reformer in Power
Gorbachev came to power with a diagnosis. The economy had been stagnating for a decade. The arms race was unsustainable. The Eastern European regimes were unstable. The Afghan war was a costly mistake. He responded with three sets of reforms. Perestroika loosened economic controls. Glasnost allowed open discussion of the system’s failures. Demokratizatsiya introduced contested elections and a real legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies.
The reforms were intended to fix the Soviet Union, not to dissolve it. The result was different. The system was too brittle for half-measures; the loosening of central control produced economic crisis without producing a working market. The opening of information destroyed the legitimacy of the Communist Party faster than the reforms could renew it. The first contested elections, in March 1989, returned a Congress of People’s Deputies that included sharp critics of the regime, including the newly-elected Boris Yeltsin.
The foreign policy changes were more immediately successful. The INF Treaty of December 1987 eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. The unilateral concessions Gorbachev announced at the United Nations in December 1988 ended the Brezhnev Doctrine and opened the way for the revolutions of 1989. Reagan and Gorbachev’s four summits transformed the relationship between the two superpowers.
The End of Power
Gorbachev survived a coup attempt in August 1991 by refusing to sign a declaration of emergency. He returned to Moscow to find the center of power he had hoped to preserve in ruins. The Ukrainian independence referendum of December 1, 1991, and the Belavezha Accords of December 8, eliminated any chance of a reformed union. On December 25, Gorbachev appeared on Soviet television and resigned.
The resignation speech is the most-quoted text of his career. He told the Soviet people that he was discontinuing his activities as president “out of considerations of principle” and 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.” It was an honorable speech in an impossible position.
After Resignation
Gorbachev led a public life after 1991. He founded a think tank, the Gorbachev Foundation, in 1991. He wrote memoirs, gave lectures, and remained a commentator on Russian and international affairs. He ran for the Russian presidency in 1996, finishing a distant second to Boris Yeltsin. He published a final book, What Is at Stake Now: My Appeal for Peace and Freedom, in 2019.
He and Raisa had outlived the Soviet Union by three decades. He died on August 30, 2022, at the age of 91, eight months into Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. The Russian government declined to declare a state funeral. Western governments and most of the Eastern European countries he had helped to free paid tribute. The judgment of his own country remains divided.
Legacy
Gorbachev’s legacy is contested. To most of the world he is the man who ended the Cold War without a shot. To many Russians he is the man who broke the country. The truth of the matter is that he is the man who made choices that no other Soviet leader was willing to make, and that the world he created in 1989 was different from the world he had intended to create. Few major historical figures have been so widely praised abroad and so controversial at home. The contradictions are real, and they are not going away.