Mikhail Gorbachev Last Leader Of The Soviet Union Dies Aged 91

His death was announced by Russian news agencies, citing the state hospital where he was being treated, but no further details were immediately available. For the sheer improbability of his actions and their impact on the late 20th century, Mr. Gorbachev ranks as a towering figure. In 1985, he was chosen to lead a country mired in socialism and elemental ideology. In six years of mistreatment, improvised tactics and increasingly bold risks, Mr. Gorbachev unleashed sweeping changes that eventually destroyed the pillars of the state. The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy. It ended a seven-decade experiment born of utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century. A costly global confrontation between East and West was abruptly ended. The division of Europe fell. The tense nuclear conflict with a superpower nuclear trigger has been mitigated, except for Armageddon. None of this could have happened except for Mr. Gorbachev. Along the way, he unleashed a revolution from on high within the Soviet Union, prodding and prodding a stagnant country in hopes of reviving it. In nearly six years of intense drama and thrilling transformation, Mr. Gorbachev pursued ever-greater ambitions for liberalization, fighting inertia and a stubborn old guard. Archie Brown, professor emeritus of politics at the College of St. Antony’s of Oxford University and an authority on Mr. Gorbachev, has written that openness and pluralism were among his unique achievements in a country that for hundreds of years was bound by authoritarian rule under czars and Soviet leaders. Mr. Gorbachev introduced the first truly competitive elections for a legislature, allowed civil society to take root and encouraged open discussion of dark passages in Soviet history. At the same time, Brown said, Mr. Gorbachev suffered setbacks, including his attempt to break central planning’s grip on the economy with reforms known as perestroika, which were started but never quite advanced, and his failure to satisfy ambitions for dominance among restive Soviet nationalities, which contributed to the centrifugal forces tearing the country apart. Many of Mr. Gorbachev’s most notable achievements haunt him. The release of the system “brought to the surface every possible long-suppressed problem and grievance in Soviet political life,” Brown recalled. “Sir. Gorbachev’s political interior was monumentally overloaded.” After a failed coup attempt by hardliners in 1991, a weakened Mr. Gorbachev eventually ceded power to even more radical reformers led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. Mr. Gorbachev had no intention of taking down that flag. He was very much a product of the system and the tumultuous events that spanned his life, from the terror of Stalin and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs, dashed expectations and stagnation of the post-war years . For many years, Mr. Gorbachev saw a huge gulf that existed between the reality of everyday Soviet life, often squalid and impoverished, and the artificial slogans of the party and leadership about a bright future under communism. Many others also saw this gap and shrugged, but what made Mr. Gorbachev different is that he was shocked by it. By the time he became the leader of the Soviet Union, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had no idea how to fix it. He hoped that unleashing the forces of transparency and political pluralism would cure the other ills.

In the shadow of Stalin and the war Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the small village of Privolnoye, in the Black Earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land in a village that had changed little over the centuries. Mr. Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents: He often lived with them. His maternal grandfather, Pandelei, was remembered by Mr. Gorbachev as a tolerant man and incredibly respected in the village. In those years, Mr. Gorbachev was an only son. a brother was born after the war, when Michael was 17 years old. Famine struck the region in 1933, when Mr. Gorbachev was 2 years old. Joseph Stalin had begun the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as kulaks who were somewhat better off. Collectivization destroyed traditional patterns of agriculture. A third to a half of Privolnoye’s population died of starvation. “Whole families would die and half-demolished huts without an owner would remain deserted for years,” he recalled. Stalin’s purges claimed millions of peasant lives in the 1930s. The Great Terror also affected Mr. Gorbachev. His paternal grandfather, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to do it himself. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the government’s sowing plan for individual farmers. “But there were no seeds available to carry out the plan,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but was released early, in 1935. Upon his return, he became the leader of the collective farm. Two years later, grandfather Pandelei was also arrested. The accusations were equally absurd, that he was a member of a counter-revolutionary organization and was sabotaging the work of the collective farm. The arrest was “my first real trauma”, Mr Gorbachev recalled. “They took him in the middle of the night.” Pandelei was released one winter afternoon in 1938 and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a handmade rustic table, he told the family everything that happened to him. Mr. Gorbachev, then 7, recalled listening intently. Pandeley said he was convinced that Stalin did not know about the wrongdoings of the secret police, who tortured him. He never discussed it again. “All this was a great shock to me and has been etched in my memory ever since,” Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. He held the secret of Pantelei’s ordeal so deeply that he did not discuss it openly until half a century later. When World War II broke out, Mr. Gorbachev’s father soon went to the front. In the summer of 1942, the village fell under German occupation, which lasted 4½ months, until Soviet troops pushed the Germans back. The war destroyed the countryside. During the war, his father’s unit was ambushed and Mr. Gorbachev’s family received a letter saying that Sergei had been killed. But it turned out to be wrong and two more letters arrived saying he was alive. When he returned home, Sergei told his son that this confusion was typical of the chaos of war. “I remember this all my life,” Mr. Gorbachev later wrote. He was 14 when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of the children of war,” he said. “He burned us, leaving his mark on both our characters and our view of the world.” Mr. Gorbachev entered Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious university, in September 1950, a peasant boy in the bustling metropolis. He arrived with only a school education in the village and was often teased by friends who had acquired more learning in earlier years. Mr. Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, targeting Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Mr. Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, was confronted by a mob who shouted, jeered, and then violently kicked off the tram. “I was shocked.” According to him, Mr. Gorbachev faced Soviet ideology like many of his generation, who hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past and believed that they were building a new society, with social justice and people . power. When Stalin died in 1953, Mr. Gorbachev joined the crowds who lined up to pay their respects in Red Square. But in the years that followed, Mr. Gorbachev saw Stalin differently. At the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and use of violence and persecution. Only after the speech, Mr. Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened in my family.” Pandelei’s grandfather had said that Stalin did not know about his torture. But, Gorbachev thought, perhaps Stalin was responsible for the family’s pain. “The document containing Khrushchev’s complaints was circulated within the party for a while and then withdrawn,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled. “But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, confused and lost. It wasn’t analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. It was easier for me. My family was itself one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.” Mr. Gorbachev later often called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It wasn’t a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. While at university, Mr. Gorbachev met and married Raisa Titorenko, a bright philosophy student. At first she avoided the villager, but eventually he charmed her. In the two years after Stalin’s death, Moscow began to open up to new ideas. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel ‘The Thaw’ was published in…

title: “Mikhail Gorbachev Last Leader Of The Soviet Union Dies Aged 91 Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-08” author: “Robert Peak”

His death was announced by Russian news agencies, citing the state hospital where he was being treated, but no further details were immediately available. For the sheer improbability of his actions and their impact on the late 20th century, Mr. Gorbachev ranks as a towering figure. In 1985, he was chosen to lead a country mired in socialism and elemental ideology. In six years of mistreatment, improvised tactics and increasingly bold risks, Mr. Gorbachev unleashed sweeping changes that eventually destroyed the pillars of the state. The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy. It ended a seven-decade experiment born of utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century. A costly global confrontation between East and West was abruptly ended. The division of Europe fell. The tense nuclear conflict with a superpower nuclear trigger has been mitigated, except for Armageddon. None of this could have happened except for Mr. Gorbachev. Along the way, he unleashed a revolution from on high within the Soviet Union, prodding and prodding a stagnant country in hopes of reviving it. In nearly six years of intense drama and thrilling transformation, Mr. Gorbachev pursued ever-greater ambitions for liberalization, fighting inertia and a stubborn old guard. Archie Brown, professor emeritus of politics at the College of St. Antony’s of Oxford University and an authority on Mr. Gorbachev, has written that openness and pluralism were among his unique achievements in a country that for hundreds of years was bound by authoritarian rule under czars and Soviet leaders. Mr. Gorbachev introduced the first truly competitive elections for a legislature, allowed civil society to take root and encouraged open discussion of dark passages in Soviet history. At the same time, Brown said, Mr. Gorbachev suffered setbacks, including his attempt to break central planning’s grip on the economy with reforms known as perestroika, which were started but never quite advanced, and his failure to satisfy ambitions for dominance among restive Soviet nationalities, which contributed to the centrifugal forces tearing the country apart. Many of Mr. Gorbachev’s most notable achievements haunt him. The release of the system “brought to the surface every possible long-suppressed problem and grievance in Soviet political life,” Brown recalled. “Sir. Gorbachev’s political interior was monumentally overloaded.” After a failed coup attempt by hardliners in 1991, a weakened Mr. Gorbachev eventually ceded power to even more radical reformers led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. Mr. Gorbachev had no intention of taking down that flag. He was very much a product of the system and the tumultuous events that spanned his life, from the terror of Stalin and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs, dashed expectations and stagnation of the post-war years . For many years, Mr. Gorbachev saw a huge gulf that existed between the reality of everyday Soviet life, often squalid and impoverished, and the artificial slogans of the party and leadership about a bright future under communism. Many others also saw this gap and shrugged, but what made Mr. Gorbachev different is that he was shocked by it. By the time he became the leader of the Soviet Union, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had no idea how to fix it. He hoped that unleashing the forces of transparency and political pluralism would cure the other ills.

In the shadow of Stalin and the war Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the small village of Privolnoye, in the Black Earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land in a village that had changed little over the centuries. Mr. Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents: He often lived with them. His maternal grandfather, Pandelei, was remembered by Mr. Gorbachev as a tolerant man and incredibly respected in the village. In those years, Mr. Gorbachev was an only son. a brother was born after the war, when Michael was 17 years old. Famine struck the region in 1933, when Mr. Gorbachev was 2 years old. Joseph Stalin had begun the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as kulaks who were somewhat better off. Collectivization destroyed traditional patterns of agriculture. A third to a half of Privolnoye’s population died of starvation. “Whole families would die and half-demolished huts without an owner would remain deserted for years,” he recalled. Stalin’s purges claimed millions of peasant lives in the 1930s. The Great Terror also affected Mr. Gorbachev. His paternal grandfather, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to do it himself. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the government’s sowing plan for individual farmers. “But there were no seeds available to carry out the plan,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but was released early, in 1935. Upon his return, he became the leader of the collective farm. Two years later, grandfather Pandelei was also arrested. The accusations were equally absurd, that he was a member of a counter-revolutionary organization and was sabotaging the work of the collective farm. The arrest was “my first real trauma”, Mr Gorbachev recalled. “They took him in the middle of the night.” Pandelei was released one winter afternoon in 1938 and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a handmade rustic table, he told the family everything that happened to him. Mr. Gorbachev, then 7, recalled listening intently. Pandeley said he was convinced that Stalin did not know about the wrongdoings of the secret police, who tortured him. He never discussed it again. “All this was a great shock to me and has been etched in my memory ever since,” Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. He held the secret of Pantelei’s ordeal so deeply that he did not discuss it openly until half a century later. When World War II broke out, Mr. Gorbachev’s father soon went to the front. In the summer of 1942, the village fell under German occupation, which lasted 4½ months, until Soviet troops pushed the Germans back. The war destroyed the countryside. During the war, his father’s unit was ambushed and Mr. Gorbachev’s family received a letter saying that Sergei had been killed. But it turned out to be wrong and two more letters arrived saying he was alive. When he returned home, Sergei told his son that this confusion was typical of the chaos of war. “I remember this all my life,” Mr. Gorbachev later wrote. He was 14 when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of the children of war,” he said. “He burned us, leaving his mark on both our characters and our view of the world.” Mr. Gorbachev entered Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious university, in September 1950, a peasant boy in the bustling metropolis. He arrived with only a school education in the village and was often teased by friends who had acquired more learning in earlier years. Mr. Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, targeting Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Mr. Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, was confronted by a mob who shouted, jeered, and then violently kicked off the tram. “I was shocked.” According to him, Mr. Gorbachev faced Soviet ideology like many of his generation, who hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past and believed that they were building a new society, with social justice and people . power. When Stalin died in 1953, Mr. Gorbachev joined the crowds who lined up to pay their respects in Red Square. But in the years that followed, Mr. Gorbachev saw Stalin differently. At the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and use of violence and persecution. Only after the speech, Mr. Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened in my family.” Pandelei’s grandfather had said that Stalin did not know about his torture. But, Gorbachev thought, perhaps Stalin was responsible for the family’s pain. “The document containing Khrushchev’s complaints was circulated within the party for a while and then withdrawn,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled. “But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, confused and lost. It wasn’t analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. It was easier for me. My family was itself one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.” Mr. Gorbachev later often called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It wasn’t a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. While at university, Mr. Gorbachev met and married Raisa Titorenko, a bright philosophy student. At first she avoided the villager, but eventually he charmed her. In the two years after Stalin’s death, Moscow began to open up to new ideas. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel ‘The Thaw’ was published in…

title: “Mikhail Gorbachev Last Leader Of The Soviet Union Dies Aged 91 Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-24” author: “Peggy Chaves”

His death was announced by Russian news agencies, citing the state hospital where he was being treated, but no further details were immediately available. For the sheer improbability of his actions and their impact on the late 20th century, Mr. Gorbachev ranks as a towering figure. In 1985, he was chosen to lead a country mired in socialism and elemental ideology. In six years of mistreatment, improvised tactics and increasingly bold risks, Mr. Gorbachev unleashed sweeping changes that eventually destroyed the pillars of the state. The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy. It ended a seven-decade experiment born of utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century. A costly global confrontation between East and West was abruptly ended. The division of Europe fell. The tense nuclear conflict with a superpower nuclear trigger has been mitigated, except for Armageddon. None of this could have happened except for Mr. Gorbachev. Along the way, he unleashed a revolution from on high within the Soviet Union, prodding and prodding a stagnant country in hopes of reviving it. In nearly six years of intense drama and thrilling transformation, Mr. Gorbachev pursued ever-greater ambitions for liberalization, fighting inertia and a stubborn old guard. Archie Brown, professor emeritus of politics at the College of St. Antony’s of Oxford University and an authority on Mr. Gorbachev, has written that openness and pluralism were among his unique achievements in a country that for hundreds of years was bound by authoritarian rule under czars and Soviet leaders. Mr. Gorbachev introduced the first truly competitive elections for a legislature, allowed civil society to take root and encouraged open discussion of dark passages in Soviet history. At the same time, Brown said, Mr. Gorbachev suffered setbacks, including his attempt to break central planning’s grip on the economy with reforms known as perestroika, which were started but never quite advanced, and his failure to satisfy ambitions for dominance among restive Soviet nationalities, which contributed to the centrifugal forces tearing the country apart. Many of Mr. Gorbachev’s most notable achievements haunt him. The release of the system “brought to the surface every possible long-suppressed problem and grievance in Soviet political life,” Brown recalled. “Sir. Gorbachev’s political interior was monumentally overloaded.” After a failed coup attempt by hardliners in 1991, a weakened Mr. Gorbachev eventually ceded power to even more radical reformers led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. Mr. Gorbachev had no intention of taking down that flag. He was very much a product of the system and the tumultuous events that spanned his life, from the terror of Stalin and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs, dashed expectations and stagnation of the post-war years . For many years, Mr. Gorbachev saw a huge gulf that existed between the reality of everyday Soviet life, often squalid and impoverished, and the artificial slogans of the party and leadership about a bright future under communism. Many others also saw this gap and shrugged, but what made Mr. Gorbachev different is that he was shocked by it. By the time he became the leader of the Soviet Union, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had no idea how to fix it. He hoped that unleashing the forces of transparency and political pluralism would cure the other ills.

In the shadow of Stalin and the war Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the small village of Privolnoye, in the Black Earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land in a village that had changed little over the centuries. Mr. Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents: He often lived with them. His maternal grandfather, Pandelei, was remembered by Mr. Gorbachev as a tolerant man and incredibly respected in the village. In those years, Mr. Gorbachev was an only son. a brother was born after the war, when Michael was 17 years old. Famine struck the region in 1933, when Mr. Gorbachev was 2 years old. Joseph Stalin had begun the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as kulaks who were somewhat better off. Collectivization destroyed traditional patterns of agriculture. A third to a half of Privolnoye’s population died of starvation. “Whole families would die and half-demolished huts without an owner would remain deserted for years,” he recalled. Stalin’s purges claimed millions of peasant lives in the 1930s. The Great Terror also affected Mr. Gorbachev. His paternal grandfather, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to do it himself. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the government’s sowing plan for individual farmers. “But there were no seeds available to carry out the plan,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but was released early, in 1935. Upon his return, he became the leader of the collective farm. Two years later, grandfather Pandelei was also arrested. The accusations were equally absurd, that he was a member of a counter-revolutionary organization and was sabotaging the work of the collective farm. The arrest was “my first real trauma”, Mr Gorbachev recalled. “They took him in the middle of the night.” Pandelei was released one winter afternoon in 1938 and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a handmade rustic table, he told the family everything that happened to him. Mr. Gorbachev, then 7, recalled listening intently. Pandeley said he was convinced that Stalin did not know about the wrongdoings of the secret police, who tortured him. He never discussed it again. “All this was a great shock to me and has been etched in my memory ever since,” Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. He held the secret of Pantelei’s ordeal so deeply that he did not discuss it openly until half a century later. When World War II broke out, Mr. Gorbachev’s father soon went to the front. In the summer of 1942, the village fell under German occupation, which lasted 4½ months, until Soviet troops pushed the Germans back. The war destroyed the countryside. During the war, his father’s unit was ambushed and Mr. Gorbachev’s family received a letter saying that Sergei had been killed. But it turned out to be wrong and two more letters arrived saying he was alive. When he returned home, Sergei told his son that this confusion was typical of the chaos of war. “I remember this all my life,” Mr. Gorbachev later wrote. He was 14 when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of the children of war,” he said. “He burned us, leaving his mark on both our characters and our view of the world.” Mr. Gorbachev entered Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious university, in September 1950, a peasant boy in the bustling metropolis. He arrived with only a school education in the village and was often teased by friends who had acquired more learning in earlier years. Mr. Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, targeting Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Mr. Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, was confronted by a mob who shouted, jeered, and then violently kicked off the tram. “I was shocked.” According to him, Mr. Gorbachev faced Soviet ideology like many of his generation, who hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past and believed that they were building a new society, with social justice and people . power. When Stalin died in 1953, Mr. Gorbachev joined the crowds who lined up to pay their respects in Red Square. But in the years that followed, Mr. Gorbachev saw Stalin differently. At the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and use of violence and persecution. Only after the speech, Mr. Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened in my family.” Pandelei’s grandfather had said that Stalin did not know about his torture. But, Gorbachev thought, perhaps Stalin was responsible for the family’s pain. “The document containing Khrushchev’s complaints was circulated within the party for a while and then withdrawn,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled. “But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, confused and lost. It wasn’t analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. It was easier for me. My family was itself one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.” Mr. Gorbachev later often called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It wasn’t a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. While at university, Mr. Gorbachev met and married Raisa Titorenko, a bright philosophy student. At first she avoided the villager, but eventually he charmed her. In the two years after Stalin’s death, Moscow began to open up to new ideas. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel ‘The Thaw’ was published in…

title: “Mikhail Gorbachev Last Leader Of The Soviet Union Dies Aged 91 Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Lance Speidel”

His death was announced by Russian news agencies, citing the state hospital where he was being treated, but no further details were immediately available. For the sheer improbability of his actions and their impact on the late 20th century, Mr. Gorbachev ranks as a towering figure. In 1985, he was chosen to lead a country mired in socialism and elemental ideology. In six years of mistreatment, improvised tactics and increasingly bold risks, Mr. Gorbachev unleashed sweeping changes that eventually destroyed the pillars of the state. The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy. It ended a seven-decade experiment born of utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century. A costly global confrontation between East and West was abruptly ended. The division of Europe fell. The tense nuclear conflict with a superpower nuclear trigger has been mitigated, except for Armageddon. None of this could have happened except for Mr. Gorbachev. Along the way, he unleashed a revolution from on high within the Soviet Union, prodding and prodding a stagnant country in hopes of reviving it. In nearly six years of intense drama and thrilling transformation, Mr. Gorbachev pursued ever-greater ambitions for liberalization, fighting inertia and a stubborn old guard. Archie Brown, professor emeritus of politics at the College of St. Antony’s of Oxford University and an authority on Mr. Gorbachev, has written that openness and pluralism were among his unique achievements in a country that for hundreds of years was bound by authoritarian rule under czars and Soviet leaders. Mr. Gorbachev introduced the first truly competitive elections for a legislature, allowed civil society to take root and encouraged open discussion of dark passages in Soviet history. At the same time, Brown said, Mr. Gorbachev suffered setbacks, including his attempt to break central planning’s grip on the economy with reforms known as perestroika, which were started but never quite advanced, and his failure to satisfy ambitions for dominance among restive Soviet nationalities, which contributed to the centrifugal forces tearing the country apart. Many of Mr. Gorbachev’s most notable achievements haunt him. The release of the system “brought to the surface every possible long-suppressed problem and grievance in Soviet political life,” Brown recalled. “Sir. Gorbachev’s political interior was monumentally overloaded.” After a failed coup attempt by hardliners in 1991, a weakened Mr. Gorbachev eventually ceded power to even more radical reformers led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. Mr. Gorbachev had no intention of taking down that flag. He was very much a product of the system and the tumultuous events that spanned his life, from the terror of Stalin and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs, dashed expectations and stagnation of the post-war years . For many years, Mr. Gorbachev saw a huge gulf that existed between the reality of everyday Soviet life, often squalid and impoverished, and the artificial slogans of the party and leadership about a bright future under communism. Many others also saw this gap and shrugged, but what made Mr. Gorbachev different is that he was shocked by it. By the time he became the leader of the Soviet Union, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had no idea how to fix it. He hoped that unleashing the forces of transparency and political pluralism would cure the other ills.

In the shadow of Stalin and the war Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the small village of Privolnoye, in the Black Earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land in a village that had changed little over the centuries. Mr. Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents: He often lived with them. His maternal grandfather, Pandelei, was remembered by Mr. Gorbachev as a tolerant man and incredibly respected in the village. In those years, Mr. Gorbachev was an only son. a brother was born after the war, when Michael was 17 years old. Famine struck the region in 1933, when Mr. Gorbachev was 2 years old. Joseph Stalin had begun the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as kulaks who were somewhat better off. Collectivization destroyed traditional patterns of agriculture. A third to a half of Privolnoye’s population died of starvation. “Whole families would die and half-demolished huts without an owner would remain deserted for years,” he recalled. Stalin’s purges claimed millions of peasant lives in the 1930s. The Great Terror also affected Mr. Gorbachev. His paternal grandfather, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to do it himself. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the government’s sowing plan for individual farmers. “But there were no seeds available to carry out the plan,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but was released early, in 1935. Upon his return, he became the leader of the collective farm. Two years later, grandfather Pandelei was also arrested. The accusations were equally absurd, that he was a member of a counter-revolutionary organization and was sabotaging the work of the collective farm. The arrest was “my first real trauma”, Mr Gorbachev recalled. “They took him in the middle of the night.” Pandelei was released one winter afternoon in 1938 and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a handmade rustic table, he told the family everything that happened to him. Mr. Gorbachev, then 7, recalled listening intently. Pandeley said he was convinced that Stalin did not know about the wrongdoings of the secret police, who tortured him. He never discussed it again. “All this was a great shock to me and has been etched in my memory ever since,” Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. He held the secret of Pantelei’s ordeal so deeply that he did not discuss it openly until half a century later. When World War II broke out, Mr. Gorbachev’s father soon went to the front. In the summer of 1942, the village fell under German occupation, which lasted 4½ months, until Soviet troops pushed the Germans back. The war destroyed the countryside. During the war, his father’s unit was ambushed and Mr. Gorbachev’s family received a letter saying that Sergei had been killed. But it turned out to be wrong and two more letters arrived saying he was alive. When he returned home, Sergei told his son that this confusion was typical of the chaos of war. “I remember this all my life,” Mr. Gorbachev later wrote. He was 14 when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of the children of war,” he said. “He burned us, leaving his mark on both our characters and our view of the world.” Mr. Gorbachev entered Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious university, in September 1950, a peasant boy in the bustling metropolis. He arrived with only a school education in the village and was often teased by friends who had acquired more learning in earlier years. Mr. Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, targeting Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Mr. Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, was confronted by a mob who shouted, jeered, and then violently kicked off the tram. “I was shocked.” According to him, Mr. Gorbachev faced Soviet ideology like many of his generation, who hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past and believed that they were building a new society, with social justice and people . power. When Stalin died in 1953, Mr. Gorbachev joined the crowds who lined up to pay their respects in Red Square. But in the years that followed, Mr. Gorbachev saw Stalin differently. At the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and use of violence and persecution. Only after the speech, Mr. Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened in my family.” Pandelei’s grandfather had said that Stalin did not know about his torture. But, Gorbachev thought, perhaps Stalin was responsible for the family’s pain. “The document containing Khrushchev’s complaints was circulated within the party for a while and then withdrawn,” Mr. Gorbachev recalled. “But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, confused and lost. It wasn’t analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. It was easier for me. My family was itself one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.” Mr. Gorbachev later often called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It wasn’t a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. While at university, Mr. Gorbachev met and married Raisa Titorenko, a bright philosophy student. At first she avoided the villager, but eventually he charmed her. In the two years after Stalin’s death, Moscow began to open up to new ideas. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel ‘The Thaw’ was published in…