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Mikhail Gorbachev (1931- )Soviet leader. Born on 2 March 1931 near Stavropol in the Caucasus to a peasant family, his village was occupied during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He was a good pupil and farm worker, so after the war his local party sponsored his further education in Moscow, where he studied law. He was active in the Communist Youth League and joined the Communist party in 1953. After university, he returned to Stavropol and in 1970 was promoted to the post of regional first secretary. The next year, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party. Acquiring a reputation for sternness and reliability, he became a member of the ruling Politburo in 1980. At first dealing with agriculture, he soon became responsible for the whole economy, then for party ideology and foreign affairs. Despite opposition, which complained about his youth, he was appointed party leader on 11 March 1985. Gorbachev brought like-minded reformers into the Politburo, including Eduard Shevardnadze as foreign minister. They improved relations with the United States, which had been poor since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and Gorbachev met US presidents more often than any other Soviet leader. With his glamorous wife Raisa, he seemed to embody a new kind of Soviet leadership – modern, moderate and open to reform. Despite his bad handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, he went ahead with reforming the Soviet state through the twin programme of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The economy, however, went from bad to worse, which undermined his popularity, and the national minorities of the Soviet Union exploited their new freedoms to voice intense criticism of central rule. When other Eastern European regimes imitated Soviet policies, as they had for decades, their hold on power disintegrated, and in 1989-90, a popular and largely non-violent revolution swept away the old Communist regimes. In the August 1991 coup attempt, Gorbachev was placed under house arrest in Crimea by the conspirators. However, such was his domestic unpopularity that he had to rely on Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin to overcome the disgruntled Communist politicians. And it was Yeltsin who presided over the break up of the Soviet empire. In December 1991, Gorbachev resigned, and a week later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In the Russian presidential election of 1996, he received less than 1% of the vote, which showed his continued unpopularity in Russia. However, in 1990, he was the first Soviet (or, indeed, Russian) statesman to win the Nobel peace prize. |
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