MOSCOW (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev, who set out to revitalize the Soviet Union but ended up unleashing forces that led to the collapse of communism, the breakup of the state and the end of the Cold War, died Tuesday. The last Soviet leader was 91.
Gorbachev died after a long illness, according to a statement issued by the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. No other details were given.
Although in power for less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a series of impressive changes. But they quickly outgrew him and led to the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the liberation of Eastern European nations from Russian domination, and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.
US President Joe Biden said Gorbachev was a “man of remarkable vision” and a “rare leader” who had “the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to get it
“The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people,” Biden said in a statement.
“It’s hard to think of a single person who altered the course of history more in a positive direction” than Gorbachev, Michael McFaul, a political analyst and former US ambassador to Moscow, said on Twitter. “Gorbachev was an idealist who believed in the power of ideas and individuals. We should learn from his legacy.”
Gorbachev’s decline was humiliating. His power irretrievably diminished by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on 25 December 1991. The Soviet Union it was forgotten a day later.
A quarter-century after the collapse, Gorbachev told The Associated Press that he had not considered using widespread force to try to hold the USSR together because he feared chaos in the nuclear nation.
“The country was loaded with weapons to the brim. And it would have immediately pushed the country into civil war,” he said.
Many of the changes, including the Soviet breakup, bore no resemblance to the transformation that Gorbachev had envisioned when he became Soviet leader in March 1985.
By the end of his reign, he was powerless to stop the whirlwind he had started. However, Gorbachev may have had a greater impact on the second half of the 20th century than any other political figure.
“I see myself as a man who initiated the necessary reforms for the country, for Europe and the world,” Gorbachev told the AP in a 1992 interview shortly after leaving office.
“I’m often asked, would I start all over again if I had to do it over again? Yes, indeed. And with more persistence and determination,” he said.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War and spent his final years collecting accolades and awards from all corners of the world. However, at home he was greatly despised.
The Russians blamed him for the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, a once-fearful superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate nations. His former allies abandoned him and made him a scapegoat for the country’s problems.
His 1996 run for president was a national joke, garnering less than 1% of the vote.
In 1997, he turned to doing a TV commercial for Pizza Hut to raise money for his charitable foundation.
“In the ad, he should take a pizza, cut it into 15 slices like he’d split our country, and then show it how to put it back together,” joked Anatoly Lukyanov, a former Gorbachev supporter.
Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. What I wanted to do was make it better.
Shortly after taking power, Gorbachev began a campaign to end his country’s economic and political stagnation, using “glasnost,” or openness, to help achieve his goal of “perestroika,” or restructuring.
In his memoirs, he said that he had long been frustrated that in a country with immense natural resources tens of millions lived in poverty.
“Our society was suffocated under the control of a bureaucratic command system,” wrote Gorbachev. “Condemned to serve the ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, he strained to the max.”
Once started, one movement led to another: he freed political prisoners, allowed open debate and multi-candidate elections, gave his countrymen freedom to travel, curbed religious oppression, reduced nuclear arsenals, established closer ties with the West and did not resist the fall of the communist regimes in the satellite states of Eastern Europe.
But the forces he unleashed quickly escaped his control.
Long-suppressed ethnic tensions erupted, leading to wars and riots in trouble spots like the South Caucasus region. Strikes and labor unrest followed rising prices and shortages of consumer goods.
In one of the low points of his tenure, Gorbachev sanctioned a crackdown on the restive Baltic republics in early 1991.
The violence turned many intellectuals and reformers against him. The competitive elections also produced a new group of populist politicians who challenged Gorbachev’s policies and authority.
Chief among them was his former protégé and eventual nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, who became Russia’s first president.
“The process of renewing this country and bringing about fundamental changes in the international community turned out to be much more complex than originally planned,” Gorbachev told the nation as he stepped down.
“However, we recognize what has been achieved so far. Society has acquired freedom; he has liberated himself politically and spiritually. And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully achieved, partly because we have not yet learned to use our freedom.”
There was little in Gorbachev’s childhood to hint at the pivotal role he would play on the world stage. On many levels, he had a typical Soviet upbringing in a typical Russian village. But it was a childhood blessed with unusual strokes of good fortune.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia. His two grandfathers were peasants, presidents of collective farms and members of the Communist Party, just like his father.
Despite 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 alleged anti-Soviet activities.
But, rare in that period, both were eventually released. In 1941, when Gorbachev was 10 years old, his father went off to war, along with most of the other men in Privolnoye.
Meanwhile, the Nazis pushed the western steppes in their blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union; they occupied Privolnoye for five months.
When the war ended, young Gorbachev was one of the few boys in the village whose father returned. By age 15, Gorbachev was helping his father drive a harvester after school and during the region’s blistering, dusty summers.
His performance earned him the order of the Red Banner of Labour, an unusual distinction for a 17-year-old. This award and his parents’ party background helped him gain admission in 1950 to the country’s top university, Moscow State.
There he met his wife, Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, and joined the Communist Party. The award and his family’s credentials also helped him overcome the misfortune of his grandfather’s arrests, which were overlooked in light of his exemplary communist conduct.
In his memoirs, Gorbachev described himself as something of a maverick as he rose through the ranks of the party, sometimes bursting with criticism of the Soviet system and its leaders.
His early career coincided with the “thaw” initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. As a young communist propaganda officer, he was tasked with explaining the 20th Party Congress that revealed Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s repression of millions to local party activists. He said he was first met with “deathly silence,” then disbelief.
“They said, ‘We don’t believe it. It can not be. You want to blame everything on Stalin now that he’s dead,” he told the AP in a 2006 interview.
He was a true, if unorthodox, believer in socialism. Elected to the party’s powerful Central Committee in 1971, he took charge of Soviet agricultural policy in 1978 and became a full member of the Politburo in 1980.
Along the way, he was able to travel to the West, to Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Canada. Those trips had a profound effect on his thinking, shaking his belief in the superiority of Soviet-style socialism.
“The question haunted me: why was the standard of living in our country lower than that of other developed countries?” he recalled in his memoirs. “It seemed that our old leaders were not particularly concerned about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life, and our backwardness in the field of advanced technologies.”
But Gorbachev had to wait his turn. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, and was succeeded by two other geriatric leaders: Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev’s mentor, and Konstantin Chernenko.
It wasn’t until March 1985, when Chernenko died, that the party finally elected a younger man to lead the country: Gorbachev. He was 54 years old.
His tenure was full of difficult periods, including an ill-conceived anti-alcohol campaign, the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
But beginning in November 1985, Gorbachev began a series of high-profile summit meetings with world leaders, especially US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, that led to deep and unprecedented reductions in the North’s nuclear arsenals. -Americans and Soviets.
After years of watching a parade of top-heavy leaders in the Kremlin, Western leaders practically swooned over the charming and vigorous Gorbachev and his elegant and intelligent wife.
But perceptions were very different at home. It was the first time since the death of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin that the wife of a Soviet leader had played such a public role and…