Mikhail Gorbachev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Gorbachev" redirects here. For other uses, see Gorbachev (disambiguation).
This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Sergeyevich and the family name is Gorbachev.
| Mikhail Gorbachev Михаил Сергеевич Горбачёв | |
 Gorbachev in 1987 | |
| | |
|---|---|
| In office 15 March 1990 – 25 December 1991 | |
| Prime Minister | Nikolai Ryzhkov Valentin Pavlov Ivan Silayev |
| Vice President | Gennady Yanayev |
| Preceded by | Andrei Gromyko |
| Succeeded by | Office abolished |
| | |
| In office 11 March 1985 – 24 August 1991 | |
| Preceded by | Konstantin Chernenko |
| Succeeded by | Vladimir Ivashko (Acting) |
| | |
| In office 1 October 1988 – 25 May 1989 | |
| Prime Minister | Nikolai Tikhonov Nikolai Ryzhkov |
| | |
| In office 25 May 1989 – 15 March 1990 | |
| Preceded by | Himself as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet |
| Succeeded by | Anatoly Lukyanov as Parliament Speaker himself as Head of State as President of the Soviet Union |
| | |
| In office 1980–1991 | |
| | |
| Born | 2 March 1931 Privolnoye, Russian SFSR, USSR |
| Birth name | Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev |
| Political party | Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1950–1991) Social Democratic Party of Russia (2001–2004) Union of Social Democrats (2007–present) Independent Democratic Party of Russia (2008–present) |
| Spouse(s) | Raisa Gorbachyova (d. 1999) |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
| Profession | Lawyer |
| Religion | None (formerly Russian Orthodoxy) |
| Signature |  |
| Website | The Gorbachev Foundation |
listen); born 2 March 1931) was the sixth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991.He was the only Soviet leader to have been born after the October Revolution of 1917. In 1989, he became the first and only Soviet leader to visit China since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s.
Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian-Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While at university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Already before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.
Gorbachev's attempts at reform as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, ended the political supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
In September 2008, Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia,[1] and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent.[2] This was Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a political party, after having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social-Democrats in 2007.[3]
Contents[show] |
[edit] Early life
 | This section requires expansion. |
[edit] Marriage and family
Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mihailovna Virganskaya (Ири́на Миха́йловна Вирга́нская), in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of Leukemia in 1999.[4][edit] Rise in the Communist Party
In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, a body of the CPSU, becoming one of the youngest provincial party chiefs in the nation.[5] In this position he helped reorganise the collective farms, improve workers' living conditions, expand the size of their private plots, and gave them a greater voice in planning.[5]
He was soon made a member of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1971. Three years later, in 1974, he was made a Representative to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs. He was subsequently appointed to the Central Committee's Secretariat for Agriculture in 1978, replacing Fyodor Kulakov, who had supported Gorbachev's appointment, after Kulakov died of a heart attack.[5][6] In 1979, Gorbachev was promoted to the Politburo, the highest authority in the country, and received full membership in 1980. Gorbachev owed his steady rise to power to the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, the powerful chief ideologist of the CPSU.[7]
During Yuri Andropov's tenure as General Secretary (1982–1984), Gorbachev became one of the Politburo's most visible and active members.[7] With responsibility over personnel, working together with Andropov, 20 percent of the top echelon of government ministers and regional governors were replaced, often with younger men. During this time Grigory Romanov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Yegor Ligachev were elevated, the latter two working closely with Gorbachev, Ryzhkov on economics, Ligachev on personnel.[8][page needed]
Gorbachev's positions within the CPSU created more opportunities to travel abroad, and this would profoundly affect his political and social views in the future as leader of the country. In 1972, he headed a Soviet delegation to Belgium,[5] and three years later he led a delegation to West Germany; in 1983 he headed a delegation to Canada to meet with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of the Commons and Senate. In 1984, he travelled to the United Kingdom, where he met British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Upon Andropov's death in 1984, the aged Konstantin Chernenko took power; after his death the following year, it became clear to the party hierarchy that younger leadership was needed.[9] Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on 11 March 1985, only three hours after Chernenko's death. Upon his accession at age 54, he was the youngest member of the Politburo.[7]
[edit] General Secretary of the CPSU
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Party's first leader to have been born after the Revolution. As de facto ruler of the USSR, he tried to reform the stagnating Party and the state economy by introducing glasnost ("openness"), perestroika ("restructuring"), demokratizatsiya ("democratization"), and uskoreniye ("acceleration" of economic development), which were launched at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February 1986.[edit] Domestic reforms
Gorbachev's primary goal as General Secretary was to revive the Soviet economy after the stagnant Brezhnev years.[7] In 1985, he announced that the Soviet economy was stalled and that reorganization was needed. Gorbachev proposed a "vague programme of reform", which was adopted at the April Plenum of the Central Committee.[6] He called for fast-paced technological modernization and increased industrial and agricultural productivity, and he attempted to reform the Soviet bureaucracy to be more efficient and prosperous.[7]Gorbachev soon realized that fixing the Soviet economy would be nearly impossible without reforming the political and social structure of the Communist nation.[10] Gorbachev also initiated the concept of gospriyomka (state acceptance of production) during his time as leader,[11] which represented state approval of goods in an effort to maintain quality control and combat inferior manufacturing.[12]
He made a speech in May 1985 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) advocating widespread reforms. The reforms began in personnel changes; the most notable change was the replacement of Andrei Gromyko as Minister of Foreign Affairs with Eduard Shevardnadze. Gromyko, disparaged as "Mr Nyet" in the West, had served for 28 years as Minister of Foreign Affairs and was considered an 'old thinker'. Robert D. English notes that, despite Shevardnadze's diplomatic inexperience, Gorbachev "shared with him an outlook" and experience in managing an agricultural region of the Soviet Union (Georgia), which meant that both had weak links to the powerful military-industrial complex.[13]
A number of reformist ideas were discussed by Politburo members. One of the first reforms Gorbachev introduced was the anti-alcohol campaign, begun in May 1985, which was designed to fight widespread alcoholism in the Soviet Union. Prices of vodka, wine, and beer were raised, and their sales were restricted. It was pursued vigorously and cut both alcohol sales and government revenue.[14] It was a serious blow to the state budget—a loss of approximately 100 billion rubles according to Alexander Yakovlev—after alcohol production migrated to the black market economy. The program proved to be a useful symbol for change in the country, however.[14]
The purpose of reform, however, was to prop up communism, not transition to market socialism. Speaking in late summer 1985 to the secretaries for economic affairs of the central committees of the East European communist parties, Gorbachev said: "Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism."[15]
