Mikhail Gorbachev

Growing up under the rule of Joseph Stalin in his youth, he operated combine harvesters on a collective farm before joining the Communist Party, which then governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state.

Growing nationalist sentiment within constituent republics threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading the hardliners within the Communist Party to launch an unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev in August 1991.

The recipient of a wide range of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, in the West he is praised for his role in ending the Cold War, introducing new political and economic freedoms in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist–Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the German reunification.

[38] During his studies, an antisemitic campaign spread through the Soviet Union, culminating in the Doctors' plot; Gorbachev publicly defended Volodya Liberman, a Jewish student accused of disloyalty.

[59] In this position, he visited villages in the area and tried to improve the lives of their inhabitants; he established a discussion circle in Gorkaya Balka to help its peasant residents gain social contacts.

[99] As regional leader, Gorbachev initially attributed economic and other failures to "the inefficiency and incompetence of cadres, flaws in management structure or gaps in legislation", but eventually concluded that they were caused by an excessive centralization of decision making in Moscow.

[147] In June he traveled to Italy as a Soviet representative for the funeral of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer,[148] and in September to Sofia, Bulgaria to attend celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of its liberation from the Nazis by the Red Army.

[190] According to Doder and Branson, this meant "greater openness and candour in government affairs and for an interplay of different and sometimes conflicting views in political debates, in the press, and in Soviet culture".

[205] From April to the end of the year, Gorbachev became open in his criticism of the Soviet system, including food production, state bureaucracy, the military draft, and the large size of the prison population.

[211] In October 1985, he met with Afghan Marxist leader Babrak Karmal, urging him to acknowledge the lack of public support for his government and pursue a power sharing agreement with the opposition.

[213] He believed in the need to improve relations with the United States; he was appalled at the prospect of nuclear war, was aware that the Soviet Union was unlikely to win the arms race, and thought that high military spending was detrimental to domestic reform.

[213] US president Ronald Reagan appeared not to want a de-escalation of tensions, having scrapped détente and arms controls, initiating a military build-up, and calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire".

[222] In his relations with the developing world, Gorbachev found many of its leaders professing revolutionary socialist credentials or a pro-Soviet attitude—such as Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Syria's Hafez al-Assad—frustrating, and his best personal relationship was with India's prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

Delivered to a ceremonial joint session of the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, it praised Lenin but criticized Stalin's human rights abuses.

According to the "Sinatra Doctrine", the Soviet Union did not interfere and the media-informed Eastern European population realized that their rulers were increasingly losing power and the Iron Curtain was falling apart.

[332] A liberalizer march took place in Moscow criticizing Communist Party rule,[333] while at a Central Committee meeting, the hardliner Vladimir Brovikov accused Gorbachev of reducing the country to "anarchy" and "ruin" and of pursuing Western approval at the expense of the Soviet Union and the Marxist–Leninist cause.

[370] Bush visited Moscow in late July, when he and Gorbachev concluded ten years of negotiations by signing the START I treaty, a bilateral agreement on the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms.

[391] Wanting to preserve the Union, in April Gorbachev and the leaders of nine Soviet republics jointly pledged to prepare a treaty that would renew the federation under a new constitution; but six of the republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia—did not endorse this.

[448] After Yeltsin's decision to lift price caps generated massive inflation and plunged many Russians into poverty, Gorbachev openly criticized him, comparing the reform to Stalin's policy of forced collectivization.

[477] After the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian War between Russia and South Ossetian separatists on one side and Georgia on the other, Gorbachev spoke out against US support for Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and for moving to bring the Caucasus into the sphere of its national interest.

[480] In 2009, Gorbachev released Songs for Raisa, an album of Russian romantic ballads, sung by him and accompanied by musician Andrey Makarevich, to raise money for a charity devoted to his late wife.

[483] In 2011, an eightieth birthday gala for him was held at London's Royal Albert Hall, featuring tributes from Shimon Peres, Lech Wałęsa, Michel Rocard, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[527] McCauley stated that the concept originally referred to "radical reform of the economic and political system" as part of Gorbachev's attempt to motivate the labor force and make management more effective.

[528] The political scientist John Gooding suggested that had the perestroika reforms succeeded, the Soviet Union would have "exchanged totalitarian controls for milder authoritarian ones" although not become "democratic in the Western sense".

[411] Russian president Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences on the death of Gorbachev,[607] and paid tribute to him at the Moscow hospital where the ex-president had died but, according to spokesman Dmitry Peskov, had no time to attend his funeral due to a busy work schedule.

[611] European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen paid tribute to him on Twitter, as did the UK's prime minister Boris Johnson, former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Ireland's Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

[614] Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said "He helped bring an end to the Cold War, embraced reforms in the Soviet Union, and reduced the threat of nuclear weapons.

[617] Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau stated that Gorbachev had "increased the scope of freedom of the enslaved peoples of the Soviet Union in an unprecedented way, giving them hope for a more dignified life".

[624] US press referred to the presence of "Gorbymania" in Western countries during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as represented by large crowds that turned out to greet his visits,[625] with Time naming him its "Man of the Decade" in the 1980s.

[634] However, he remains a controversial figure in former Soviet-occupied and administered countries such as the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Poland, after violent repressions against the local populations who sought independence.

Gorbachev and his Ukrainian maternal grandparents, late 1930s
Gorbachev on a visit to East Germany in 1966
Part of the Great Stavropol Canal constructed under Gorbachev's regional leadership
Gorbachev was skeptical of the deployment of Soviet troops in Afghanistan (pictured here in 1986)
Gorbachev in 1985 at a summit in Geneva , Switzerland
Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate in 1986 during a visit to East Germany
Gorbachev's visit to Vilnius in 1990 in an attempt to stop Lithuania's declaration of independence , which passed two months later
US president Reagan and Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, 1986
Gorbachev with Erich Honecker of East Germany. Privately, Gorbachev told Chernyaev that Honecker was a "scumbag". [ 218 ]
Gorbachev in the USA in 1987
Gorbachev and his wife Raisa on a trip to Poland in 1988
Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with Reagan at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland , 1985
Reagan and Gorbachev with wives (Nancy and Raisa, respectively) attending a dinner at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, 1987
Gorbachev meeting the Romanian Marxist–Leninist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1985.
Berlin Wall, Thank you, Gorbi! , October 1990
Gorbachev addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1988. During the speech, he dramatically announced deep unilateral cuts in Soviet military forces in Eastern Europe.
In September 1990, Gorbachev met repeatedly with US president George Bush (Sr) at the Helsinki Summit
Gorbachev in October 1991
Tens of thousands of anti-coup protesters surrounding the White House , Moscow
Leaders of the Soviet Republics sign the Belovezha Accords , which eliminated the USSR and established the Commonwealth of Independent States , 1991
Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991
Gorbachev visiting Reagan, at Rancho del Cielo in 1992
Gorbachev giving a speech at the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan, 1994
Gorbachev with Argentine president Carlos Menem in 1999
Gorbachev, daughter Irina and his wife's sister Lyudmila at the funeral of Raisa, 1999
Gorbachev attended the inauguration of Vladimir Putin in May 2000
Gorbachev (right) being introduced to US president Barack Obama by US vice president Joe Biden , March 2009. US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul is pictured in the background.
The official Soviet portrait of Gorbachev. Many official photographs and visual depictions of Gorbachev removed the port-wine birthmark from his head. [ 538 ]
Gorbachev at the Western Wall in Jerusalem , 1992
Gorbachev in Moscow, 2019, receiving assistance in walking
Corpse of Gorbachev lying in state at the House of Unions
Former US president Ronald Reagan awards the first Ronald Reagan Freedom Award to Gorbachev at the Reagan Library , 1992
Waxworks of Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev at Madame Tussauds , London