Gorbachev, Mikhail (1931–)

Soviet leader whose policies of glasnost and perestroika opened the Soviet Union to reform and contributed to the ultimate demise of the Soviet Communist state. A Nobel Prize winner in 1990, Gorbachev is credited with helping to end the Cold War.

Born March 2, 1931, Mikhail Gorbachev hailed from a peasant family in the village of Privolnoye, located in the southern Russian region of Stavropol. Gorbachev studied law at Moscow State University, where he joined the Communist Party in 1952, the [Page 298]same year that he completed his law degree at the university.

During the early 1960s, Gorbachev returned to the Stavropol region to become head of the agriculture ministry. By the end of the decade, he had risen to top of the party hierarchy in the region, and, in 1978, he was back in Moscow. Under the guidance of Yuri Andropov (one of his predecessors as Soviet leader), Gorbachev began his rise in the ranks of the Kremlin hierarchy. With the deaths of Andropov and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected general-secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985 at the age of 54.

From the beginning, Gorbachev was openly reform-minded and critical of Communist Party excesses. After his relatively unsuccessful stewardship of Soviet agriculture, the rising star had come to realize that the communist collective system was fundamentally flawed. More outspoken than many of his peers, he quickly built a reputation as an enemy of corruption and a proponent of change.

As head of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev began to put his ideas into action. With a call for systemic democratization and an end to inefficiency, he launched his signature programs glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) soon after becoming Soviet leader. Aware of the financial toll that the arms race with the United States was taking on the Russian economy and society, he also became a staunch advocate of weapons reduction.

Gorbachev saw the end of the arms race and the militarization of space—which the United States had inspired through its Strategic Defense Initiative—as another way of easing the burden on a weak Soviet economy. To this end, he opened a dialogue with Western leaders, emphasizing the shared benefits of discussing missile reductions. In a series of summit talks, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improved. An Intermediate Nuclear Forces arms limitation treaty was signed in 1987. By 1989, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ended, and the communist monopoly on political power in Eastern Europe had drawn to a close as well. For his contributions to reducing East–West tensions, Gorbachev was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize.

Winning the Nobel Prize did not improve the situation for Gorbachev in Russia, however. By 1990, his perestroika program was failing. Significant upgrades to the economy had not materialized, and political and social control was eroding. Moreover, in response to Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, Soviet republics were demanding independence, and in many regions of the vast Soviet territory, latent ethnic and national tensions began to erupt.

As the reform drive in the Soviet Union stalled, both reformers and conservatives roiled in discontent. In trying to reform the Communist Party, Gorbachev had drawn the ire of party hard-liners, who bemoaned the loss of their empire. On the other hand, he also drew fire from reformers, who found him guilty of appeasing the old regime.

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