- Rumblings in Iran (December 11, 2002)
...at the Islamic Republic may be tottering, recall the lesson history taught Mikhail Gorbachev: A political system rooted in lies and repression cannot long survive the... - Kill Missile Defense Now (December 20, 2004)
...viets that it helped collapse the East blocwas belied by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachevs dismissal of Reagans dream by saying that he could build offensive miss... - Anti-War Voices Can Trump Bush's Failed Iraq Policy (October 3, 2002)
...gerald in The New York Review of Books, Cheney didn't trust Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and advised President Reagan to keep up Cold War pressure rather than enco... - Has the US Lost Its Way? (March 3, 2002)
...gnisable. It includes political figures such as Lady Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev; businessmen admirers of US laissez-faire economics; foreign teenagers dev... - The World in 2005 (March 1, 2002)
...ptian equivalent of the Soviet Union's Brezhnev-Chernenko era. There is no Mikhail Gorbachev on the horizon. Saudi Arabia, despite its oil wealth, will prove even less... - The Sunshine Warrior (September 22, 2002)
...raveling and the first President Bush was clinging to the waning figure of Mikhail Gorbachev, Wolfowitz and his boss, Cheney, believed that Boris N. Yeltsin represente... - , from which parts of this article have been taken.
- Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Mikhail Gorbachev, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1988, trade paperback, 297 pages,
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Mikhail Gorbachev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (in : Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв) (born , ), was leader of the from until . His attempts at reform led to the end of the , but also inadvertently caused the end of the political supremacy of the (CPSU) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
He studied law at , where he met his future wife, . They were married in September 1953 and moved to Mr. Gorbachev's home region of Stavropol in southern Russia when he graduated in 1955.
Mikhail Gorbachev joined the CPSU in at the age of 21. In 1966, at age 35, he graduated from the Agricultural Institute as an agronomist- economist. His career moved forward rapidly, and in 1970 he was appointed First Secretary for Agriculture and the following year made a member of the Central Committee. In 1972, he headed a Soviet delegation to and two years later, in 1974, he was made a Representative to the Supreme Soviet, and Chairman of the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs. He was elevated to the in . There, he received the patronage of , head of the and also a native of Stavropol, and was promoted during Andropov's brief time as leader of the Party before his death in .
His positions within the CPSU created more opportunities to travel abroad that would profoundly affect his political and social views in the future as leader of the country. In 1975, he led a delegation to and in 1983 he headed a Soviet delegation to to meet with and members of the and . In 1985, he traveled to the , where he met with .
On the death of , Mikhail Gorbachev, at age 54, was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party on , . As the de facto ruler of the , he tried to reform the stagnating Communist rule by introducing - openness, and - restructuring, which were launched at the 27th Congress of CPSU in .
In , Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would abandon the , and allow the Eastern European countries to turn to democracy, if they wished. He jokingly called his new doctrine the . This led to the string of revolutions in Eastern Europe throughout in which Communism collapsed. With the exception of , the collapses were all peaceful ones. This effectively ended the , and for this Gorbachev was awarded the on , .
But the democratization of the USSR and Eastern Europe tore away the power of the Communist party and himself, and occurred in . During this time, he spent three days (August 19 to 21) under house arrest at a dacha in the Crimea before being freed and restored to power. But upon his return, Gorbachev found that support had swung over to his colleague, . Further, Gorbachev was forced to sack large numbers of his Politburo and in several cases, arrest them. Those arrested for high treason include the 'Gang of Eight' that had led the coup.
Gorbachev was elected as the first executive president of the Soviet Union on , but would later resign on , . Gorbachev is generally well regarded in the West for having ended the Cold War. However in Russia, his reputation is very low because it was through his perceived childish attempt to bring in a Western-style democracy by creating successive power vacuums leading steadily towards the Soviet heartland, rather than through a controlled and orderly partial conversion to a market-driven economy to be followed by a democracy sponsored and controlled by the resulting capitalist classes and moderated by the people at large, that he brought about the collapse of the Eastern European system and the Soviet Union itself and the catastrophic misery that followed.
In 1997, Gorbachev starred in a Pizza Hut commercial made for the USA to raise money for the .
Gorbachev founded the in , and in . He became a member of the .
On November 26, 2001 Gorbachev also founded the - which is a union between several Russian social democrat parties.
Gorbachev won a Grammy in 2003 for Best Spoken Word Album for Children, called "Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf/Beintus: Wolf Tracks," along with Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren.
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Further Reading
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Preceded by: |
Succeeded by: during coup attempt in August 1991. On December 25, 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved and Russia became independent as the Russian Federation, led by |