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.