When the war was over, young Gorbachev was one of the few village boys whose father returned.īy age 15, Gorbachev was helping his father drive a combine harvester after school and during the region’s blistering, dusty summers. They occupied Privolnoye for five months. Meanwhile, the Nazis pushed across the western steppes in their blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. In 1941, when Gorbachev was 10, his father went off to war, along with most of the other men from Privolnoye. But, rare in that period, both were eventually freed. Both his grandfathers were peasants, collective farm chairmen and members of the Communist Party, as was his father.ĭespite stellar party credentials, Gorbachev’s family did not emerge unscathed from the terror unleashed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin: Both grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned for allegedly anti-Soviet activities. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia. On many levels, he had a typical Soviet upbringing in a typical Russian village.īut it was a childhood blessed with unusual strokes of good fortune. There was little in Gorbachev’s childhood to hint at the pivotal role he would play on the world stage.
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And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully come to grips with, in part because we still have not learned how to use our freedom.” Society has acquired freedom it has been freed politically and spiritually. “However, let us acknowledge what has been achieved so far.
“The process of renovating this country and bringing about fundamental changes in the international community proved to be much more complex than originally anticipated,” Gorbachev told the nation as he stepped down. Chief among them was his former protege and eventual nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, who became Russia’s first president. The violence turned many intellectuals and reformers against him.Ĭompetitive elections also produced a new crop of populist politicians who challenged Gorbachev’s policies and authority. In one of the low points of his tenure, Gorbachev sanctioned a crackdown on the restive Baltic republics in early 1991. Strikes and labor unrest followed price increases and shortages of consumer goods. Long-suppressed ethnic tensions flared, sparking wars and unrest in trouble spots such as the southern Caucasus region. Yet Gorbachev may have had a greater impact on the second half of the 20th century than any other political figure.īut the forces he unleashed quickly escaped his control. Many of the changes, including the Soviet breakup, bore no resemblance to the transformation that Gorbachev had envisioned when he became the Soviet leader in March 1985.īy the end of his rule, he was powerless to halt the whirlwind he had sown. 25, 1991, and the Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later. His power hopelessly sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, Gorbachev spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on Dec. The country had fallen apart in his hands, and at home he was derided, despised and increasingly shunted aside as irrelevant. By 1990, he had won the Nobel Prize for his “leading role” in ending the Cold War and reducing nuclear tensions.īut a mere year later, he was the sad and bewildered embodiment of failure. His vision of remaking the Soviet Union into a more humane and flexible country had the power of the epochal. The splotchy purple birthmark on his bald pate made him instantly recognizable, and his vigor stood in sharp contrast to the recent run of aged and barely articulate Kremlin leaders. Gorbachev died Tuesday at a Moscow hospital at 91.Īlthough little known outside Sovietologist circles before he became leader in 1985, he quickly became a dominant and charismatic figure on the world stage. But he was unable to control the forces he unleashed - and ultimately waged a losing battle to salvage a crumbling empire. Under Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall crumbled, thousands of political prisoners were released and millions of people who had known only communism got their first real taste of freedom.
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With a breathtaking series of reforms, Gorbachev changed all that - and redirected the course of the 20th century.Īlongside Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev was a key protagonist in a global drama that many thought impossible and, for those who lived through it, seemed almost surreal. MOSCOW (AP) - Before Mikhail Gorbachev came along, the Soviet Union seemed an immovable superpower in perpetual antagonism to the United States.
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