Obituaries Mikhail Gorbachev Russia

What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a reform process and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to get out of hand. The great facilitator, he continued, even to the point of stepping down with dignity as his power waned. In the wake of his fall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the West to deride Gorbachev as “another communist at heart.” He was called a failure because he was unwilling to loosen state-controlled prices, privatize industry and open the Soviet economy to outside powers as quickly as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s right-wing Western advisers wanted. He was mocked for trying to “reform” communism when he should have acknowledged it was dead. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s authority is challenged by Boris Yeltsin, right, as president of Russia at the Russian Federation parliament in Moscow on August 23, 1991. Photo: Boris Yurchenko/AP The accusations were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they characterized Gorbachev as an ideologue, when in fact he was one of the great pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only thing that was true was that he tried to “reform” life for Russians. It sought to preserve some form of democratic socialism, with a continued role for government intervention and a foundation of social justice. Compared to the crony capitalism and chaotic collapse of public services that marked the early years of post-communism in Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were various ways of developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the process should be gradual was legitimate and laudable. Gorbachev was not the only one who failed to predict the collapse of the communist system. None of his contemporaries saw the situation more clearly than he, nor did Western politicians or analysts. By 1988 – just three years before the end – Yeltsin was pleading with the Communist Party to “rehabilitate” him and give him another chance after resigning from political office. Right-wing Western politicians, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, later claimed they caused the collapse by “resisting totalitarianism”. But the file shows that the system self-destructed. Communism, in practice, was never a monolith. It was constantly evolving. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin demolished the last bastions of consensus and used terror as the central pillar of regime stability. But during the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 to 1982, the terror disappeared. The stability of the system still rested partly on repression, but also on its ability to provide a secure material environment for the vast majority and a slowly improving standard of living. Much of it was paid for by the export of abundant oil and gas reserves, but it could have continued under Gorbachev for another 10 or 20 years. There was no compelling urgency to the perestroika (“restructuring” or “transformation”) process that began. The system was not as effective as it should have been and the Soviet citizens were not as happy as the propaganda claimed. But neither was he on the verge of rebellion. Five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 40% of Russian voters were still willing to support the Communist Party candidate in the 1996 presidential election. Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, right, are welcomed to London by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1993. Photo: Neil Munns/PA Gorbachev’s story, in fact, is a good example of the occasional importance of the personal factor in human history. As secretary general, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. He could have remained in office for years had he not chosen the path of reform. The son of Maria (née Gopkalo) and Sergei Gorbachev, he was born in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. His paternal grandfather was the chairman of the first collective farm in the area and a member of the party. his father was a tractor driver. Misha, as Michael was known, was trained locally and helped in the summer with the harvest. An intelligent and ambitious boy, when he left school he applied to enter the law school of the prestigious Moscow State University. The five years he spent there from 1950 marked him as something of an intellectual, although a contemporary with whom he shared rooms, the Czech Zdenek Mlynar, recalled that a favorite quote of Gorbachev’s came from Hegel: “Truth is always concrete.” He used the expression to highlight the gap between what the professors said about Soviet life and the reality on the ground. Stalin’s death occurred on March 5, 1953, halfway through Gorbachev’s time at the university. Although both of his grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s – one of them sent to a labor camp in Siberia for “sabotaging” socialism – Gorbachev reacted like most of his contemporaries. deeply moved, he spent the whole night in line to see the dictator’s body in state. The ensuing thaw made his professors more open and interesting, he wrote in his autobiography, but it was not enough to deter him from an orthodox career pattern. The position of first secretary of the Stavropol party organization was a position similar to that of the governor general He was active in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Union, while at university, and after graduating in 1955 he returned to Stavropol to work in the local mobilization and propaganda department. He moved into the party itself and made a rapid rise through its ranks. Within 15 years he was the first secretary of the regional party organization of Stavroupolis. In the top-down, hierarchical structure it was a position similar to the governor-general. Orders were taken from above and delivered from below, without any serious or open discussion of other options. The job gave the holder an almost automatic seat on the party’s central committee, in theory the main policy-making body. At 40, Gorbachev was one of its youngest members. Stavropol was a relatively rich and agriculturally efficient region, and Gorbachev, as the leading regional man, met his predecessors, Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, then near the top of the Soviet system. He also knew Fyodor Kulakov, the man in charge of Soviet agriculture, who seemed destined for the top job, general secretary of the central committee. But Kulakov died suddenly in 1978 and Gorbachev was given the portfolio of agriculture, a job that also gave him a nomination to the central committee’s inner cabinet, the politburo. He was now himself close to the seat of power and the youngest member of an increasingly aging group of men. It saw the semi-senile Brezhnev, driven by vanity and refusing to retire, take the fateful decision with veteran Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov to invade Afghanistan in 1979 without consulting the Politburo. Whatever he thought, Gorbachev was too good an official to oppose the decision. The man he admired was Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev in 1982 and tried to speed up economic growth by raising the rate of investment and giving businesses limited permission to keep some of their profits. Andropov also hoped to channel investment away from the military-industrial complex by putting a cap on the arms race. But his health failed and he died in 1984, after only 14 months in power. Gorbachev should have been the obvious successor, but the politburo chose another sick figure, Konstantin Chernenko. The old guard thought Gorbachev was still too young. When Chernenko died a year later, Gorbachev’s turn as general secretary was almost inevitable. He did not come to power with a plan, telling some colleagues that “things” cannot continue as they are His colleagues had no idea that he would start a chain of dramatic reforms. But he didn’t either. He did not come to power with a plan. He had told some of his contemporaries, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he was to appoint as foreign minister, that “things” could not go on as they were. What he was referring to was the economy, where defense spending was growing faster than any other sector. At first, he continued on the Andropov path of controlled reform, or uskorenye (acceleration). But there were two differences. Gorbachev knew that a group of younger people in the middle ranks of the central party apparatus in Moscow – as well as in the academic institutes – thought like him. He could count on their support. He decided to become more open to the problems of Soviet society by traveling around the country, admitting the difficulties and listening to ordinary people complain. Uskorenia changed to perestroika. The hope was that the Soviet people, in return for the leadership’s new honesty, would join a new social contract and work harder and more efficiently. Gorbachev ideologues described it as the “human factor”, an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czech and Slovak reformers tried to introduce “socialism with a human face”. It also sought to gain greater consensus by allowing writers and journalists to reopen many taboo issues. The gaps in official Soviet history — such as Stalin’s…

title: “Obituaries Mikhail Gorbachev Russia Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-03” author: “Cynthia Backhaus”

What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a reform process and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to get out of hand. The great facilitator, he continued, even to the point of stepping down with dignity as his power waned. In the wake of his fall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the West to deride Gorbachev as “another communist at heart.” He was called a failure because he was unwilling to loosen state-controlled prices, privatize industry and open the Soviet economy to outside powers as quickly as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s right-wing Western advisers wanted. He was mocked for trying to “reform” communism when he should have acknowledged it was dead. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s authority is challenged by Boris Yeltsin, right, as president of Russia at the Russian Federation parliament in Moscow on August 23, 1991. Photo: Boris Yurchenko/AP The accusations were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they characterized Gorbachev as an ideologue, when in fact he was one of the great pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only thing that was true was that he tried to “reform” life for Russians. It sought to preserve some form of democratic socialism, with a continued role for government intervention and a foundation of social justice. Compared to the crony capitalism and chaotic collapse of public services that marked the early years of post-communism in Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were various ways of developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the process should be gradual was legitimate and laudable. Gorbachev was not the only one who failed to predict the collapse of the communist system. None of his contemporaries saw the situation more clearly than he, nor did Western politicians or analysts. By 1988 – just three years before the end – Yeltsin was pleading with the Communist Party to “rehabilitate” him and give him another chance after resigning from political office. Right-wing Western politicians, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, later claimed they caused the collapse by “resisting totalitarianism”. But the file shows that the system self-destructed. Communism, in practice, was never a monolith. It was constantly evolving. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin demolished the last bastions of consensus and used terror as the central pillar of regime stability. But during the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 to 1982, the terror disappeared. The stability of the system still rested partly on repression, but also on its ability to provide a secure material environment for the vast majority and a slowly improving standard of living. Much of it was paid for by the export of abundant oil and gas reserves, but it could have continued under Gorbachev for another 10 or 20 years. There was no compelling urgency to the perestroika (“restructuring” or “transformation”) process that began. The system was not as effective as it should have been and the Soviet citizens were not as happy as the propaganda claimed. But neither was he on the verge of rebellion. Five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 40% of Russian voters were still willing to support the Communist Party candidate in the 1996 presidential election. Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, right, are welcomed to London by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1993. Photo: Neil Munns/PA Gorbachev’s story, in fact, is a good example of the occasional importance of the personal factor in human history. As secretary general, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. He could have remained in office for years had he not chosen the path of reform. The son of Maria (née Gopkalo) and Sergei Gorbachev, he was born in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. His paternal grandfather was the chairman of the first collective farm in the area and a member of the party. his father was a tractor driver. Misha, as Michael was known, was trained locally and helped in the summer with the harvest. An intelligent and ambitious boy, when he left school he applied to enter the law school of the prestigious Moscow State University. The five years he spent there from 1950 marked him as something of an intellectual, although a contemporary with whom he shared rooms, the Czech Zdenek Mlynar, recalled that a favorite quote of Gorbachev’s came from Hegel: “Truth is always concrete.” He used the expression to highlight the gap between what the professors said about Soviet life and the reality on the ground. Stalin’s death occurred on March 5, 1953, halfway through Gorbachev’s time at the university. Although both of his grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s – one of them sent to a labor camp in Siberia for “sabotaging” socialism – Gorbachev reacted like most of his contemporaries. deeply moved, he spent the whole night in line to see the dictator’s body in state. The ensuing thaw made his professors more open and interesting, he wrote in his autobiography, but it was not enough to deter him from an orthodox career pattern. The position of first secretary of the Stavropol party organization was a position similar to that of the governor general He was active in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Union, while at university, and after graduating in 1955 he returned to Stavropol to work in the local mobilization and propaganda department. He moved into the party itself and made a rapid rise through its ranks. Within 15 years he was the first secretary of the regional party organization of Stavroupolis. In the top-down, hierarchical structure it was a position similar to the governor-general. Orders were taken from above and delivered from below, without any serious or open discussion of other options. The job gave the holder an almost automatic seat on the party’s central committee, in theory the main policy-making body. At 40, Gorbachev was one of its youngest members. Stavropol was a relatively rich and agriculturally efficient region, and Gorbachev, as the leading regional man, met his predecessors, Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, then near the top of the Soviet system. He also knew Fyodor Kulakov, the man in charge of Soviet agriculture, who seemed destined for the top job, general secretary of the central committee. But Kulakov died suddenly in 1978 and Gorbachev was given the portfolio of agriculture, a job that also gave him a nomination to the central committee’s inner cabinet, the politburo. He was now himself close to the seat of power and the youngest member of an increasingly aging group of men. It saw the semi-senile Brezhnev, driven by vanity and refusing to retire, take the fateful decision with veteran Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov to invade Afghanistan in 1979 without consulting the Politburo. Whatever he thought, Gorbachev was too good an official to oppose the decision. The man he admired was Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev in 1982 and tried to speed up economic growth by raising the rate of investment and giving businesses limited permission to keep some of their profits. Andropov also hoped to channel investment away from the military-industrial complex by putting a cap on the arms race. But his health failed and he died in 1984, after only 14 months in power. Gorbachev should have been the obvious successor, but the politburo chose another sick figure, Konstantin Chernenko. The old guard thought Gorbachev was still too young. When Chernenko died a year later, Gorbachev’s turn as general secretary was almost inevitable. He did not come to power with a plan, telling some colleagues that “things” cannot continue as they are His colleagues had no idea that he would start a chain of dramatic reforms. But he didn’t either. He did not come to power with a plan. He had told some of his contemporaries, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he was to appoint as foreign minister, that “things” could not go on as they were. What he was referring to was the economy, where defense spending was growing faster than any other sector. At first, he continued on the Andropov path of controlled reform, or uskorenye (acceleration). But there were two differences. Gorbachev knew that a group of younger people in the middle ranks of the central party apparatus in Moscow – as well as in the academic institutes – thought like him. He could count on their support. He decided to become more open to the problems of Soviet society by traveling around the country, admitting the difficulties and listening to ordinary people complain. Uskorenia changed to perestroika. The hope was that the Soviet people, in return for the leadership’s new honesty, would join a new social contract and work harder and more efficiently. Gorbachev ideologues described it as the “human factor”, an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czech and Slovak reformers tried to introduce “socialism with a human face”. It also sought to gain greater consensus by allowing writers and journalists to reopen many taboo issues. The gaps in official Soviet history — such as Stalin’s…

title: “Obituaries Mikhail Gorbachev Russia Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-10-21” author: “James Fields”

What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a reform process and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to get out of hand. The great facilitator, he continued, even to the point of stepping down with dignity as his power waned. In the wake of his fall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the West to deride Gorbachev as “another communist at heart.” He was called a failure because he was unwilling to loosen state-controlled prices, privatize industry and open the Soviet economy to outside powers as quickly as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s right-wing Western advisers wanted. He was mocked for trying to “reform” communism when he should have acknowledged it was dead. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s authority is challenged by Boris Yeltsin, right, as president of Russia at the Russian Federation parliament in Moscow on August 23, 1991. Photo: Boris Yurchenko/AP The accusations were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they characterized Gorbachev as an ideologue, when in fact he was one of the great pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only thing that was true was that he tried to “reform” life for Russians. It sought to preserve some form of democratic socialism, with a continued role for government intervention and a foundation of social justice. Compared to the crony capitalism and chaotic collapse of public services that marked the early years of post-communism in Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were various ways of developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the process should be gradual was legitimate and laudable. Gorbachev was not the only one who failed to predict the collapse of the communist system. None of his contemporaries saw the situation more clearly than he, nor did Western politicians or analysts. By 1988 – just three years before the end – Yeltsin was pleading with the Communist Party to “rehabilitate” him and give him another chance after resigning from political office. Right-wing Western politicians, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, later claimed they caused the collapse by “resisting totalitarianism”. But the file shows that the system self-destructed. Communism, in practice, was never a monolith. It was constantly evolving. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin demolished the last bastions of consensus and used terror as the central pillar of regime stability. But during the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 to 1982, the terror disappeared. The stability of the system still rested partly on repression, but also on its ability to provide a secure material environment for the vast majority and a slowly improving standard of living. Much of it was paid for by the export of abundant oil and gas reserves, but it could have continued under Gorbachev for another 10 or 20 years. There was no compelling urgency to the perestroika (“restructuring” or “transformation”) process that began. The system was not as effective as it should have been and the Soviet citizens were not as happy as the propaganda claimed. But neither was he on the verge of rebellion. Five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 40% of Russian voters were still willing to support the Communist Party candidate in the 1996 presidential election. Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, right, are welcomed to London by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1993. Photo: Neil Munns/PA Gorbachev’s story, in fact, is a good example of the occasional importance of the personal factor in human history. As secretary general, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. He could have remained in office for years had he not chosen the path of reform. The son of Maria (née Gopkalo) and Sergei Gorbachev, he was born in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. His paternal grandfather was the chairman of the first collective farm in the area and a member of the party. his father was a tractor driver. Misha, as Michael was known, was trained locally and helped in the summer with the harvest. An intelligent and ambitious boy, when he left school he applied to enter the law school of the prestigious Moscow State University. The five years he spent there from 1950 marked him as something of an intellectual, although a contemporary with whom he shared rooms, the Czech Zdenek Mlynar, recalled that a favorite quote of Gorbachev’s came from Hegel: “Truth is always concrete.” He used the expression to highlight the gap between what the professors said about Soviet life and the reality on the ground. Stalin’s death occurred on March 5, 1953, halfway through Gorbachev’s time at the university. Although both of his grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s – one of them sent to a labor camp in Siberia for “sabotaging” socialism – Gorbachev reacted like most of his contemporaries. deeply moved, he spent the whole night in line to see the dictator’s body in state. The ensuing thaw made his professors more open and interesting, he wrote in his autobiography, but it was not enough to deter him from an orthodox career pattern. The position of first secretary of the Stavropol party organization was a position similar to that of the governor general He was active in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Union, while at university, and after graduating in 1955 he returned to Stavropol to work in the local mobilization and propaganda department. He moved into the party itself and made a rapid rise through its ranks. Within 15 years he was the first secretary of the regional party organization of Stavroupolis. In the top-down, hierarchical structure it was a position similar to the governor-general. Orders were taken from above and delivered from below, without any serious or open discussion of other options. The job gave the holder an almost automatic seat on the party’s central committee, in theory the main policy-making body. At 40, Gorbachev was one of its youngest members. Stavropol was a relatively rich and agriculturally efficient region, and Gorbachev, as the leading regional man, met his predecessors, Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, then near the top of the Soviet system. He also knew Fyodor Kulakov, the man in charge of Soviet agriculture, who seemed destined for the top job, general secretary of the central committee. But Kulakov died suddenly in 1978 and Gorbachev was given the portfolio of agriculture, a job that also gave him a nomination to the central committee’s inner cabinet, the politburo. He was now himself close to the seat of power and the youngest member of an increasingly aging group of men. It saw the semi-senile Brezhnev, driven by vanity and refusing to retire, take the fateful decision with veteran Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov to invade Afghanistan in 1979 without consulting the Politburo. Whatever he thought, Gorbachev was too good an official to oppose the decision. The man he admired was Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev in 1982 and tried to speed up economic growth by raising the rate of investment and giving businesses limited permission to keep some of their profits. Andropov also hoped to channel investment away from the military-industrial complex by putting a cap on the arms race. But his health failed and he died in 1984, after only 14 months in power. Gorbachev should have been the obvious successor, but the politburo chose another sick figure, Konstantin Chernenko. The old guard thought Gorbachev was still too young. When Chernenko died a year later, Gorbachev’s turn as general secretary was almost inevitable. He did not come to power with a plan, telling some colleagues that “things” cannot continue as they are His colleagues had no idea that he would start a chain of dramatic reforms. But he didn’t either. He did not come to power with a plan. He had told some of his contemporaries, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he was to appoint as foreign minister, that “things” could not go on as they were. What he was referring to was the economy, where defense spending was growing faster than any other sector. At first, he continued on the Andropov path of controlled reform, or uskorenye (acceleration). But there were two differences. Gorbachev knew that a group of younger people in the middle ranks of the central party apparatus in Moscow – as well as in the academic institutes – thought like him. He could count on their support. He decided to become more open to the problems of Soviet society by traveling around the country, admitting the difficulties and listening to ordinary people complain. Uskorenia changed to perestroika. The hope was that the Soviet people, in return for the leadership’s new honesty, would join a new social contract and work harder and more efficiently. Gorbachev ideologues described it as the “human factor”, an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czech and Slovak reformers tried to introduce “socialism with a human face”. It also sought to gain greater consensus by allowing writers and journalists to reopen many taboo issues. The gaps in official Soviet history — such as Stalin’s…

title: “Obituaries Mikhail Gorbachev Russia Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-02” author: “Robert Gordon”

What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a reform process and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to get out of hand. The great facilitator, he continued, even to the point of stepping down with dignity as his power waned. In the wake of his fall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the West to deride Gorbachev as “another communist at heart.” He was called a failure because he was unwilling to loosen state-controlled prices, privatize industry and open the Soviet economy to outside powers as quickly as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s right-wing Western advisers wanted. He was mocked for trying to “reform” communism when he should have acknowledged it was dead. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s authority is challenged by Boris Yeltsin, right, as president of Russia at the Russian Federation parliament in Moscow on August 23, 1991. Photo: Boris Yurchenko/AP The accusations were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they characterized Gorbachev as an ideologue, when in fact he was one of the great pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only thing that was true was that he tried to “reform” life for Russians. It sought to preserve some form of democratic socialism, with a continued role for government intervention and a foundation of social justice. Compared to the crony capitalism and chaotic collapse of public services that marked the early years of post-communism in Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were various ways of developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the process should be gradual was legitimate and laudable. Gorbachev was not the only one who failed to predict the collapse of the communist system. None of his contemporaries saw the situation more clearly than he, nor did Western politicians or analysts. By 1988 – just three years before the end – Yeltsin was pleading with the Communist Party to “rehabilitate” him and give him another chance after resigning from political office. Right-wing Western politicians, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, later claimed they caused the collapse by “resisting totalitarianism”. But the file shows that the system self-destructed. Communism, in practice, was never a monolith. It was constantly evolving. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin demolished the last bastions of consensus and used terror as the central pillar of regime stability. But during the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 to 1982, the terror disappeared. The stability of the system still rested partly on repression, but also on its ability to provide a secure material environment for the vast majority and a slowly improving standard of living. Much of it was paid for by the export of abundant oil and gas reserves, but it could have continued under Gorbachev for another 10 or 20 years. There was no compelling urgency to the perestroika (“restructuring” or “transformation”) process that began. The system was not as effective as it should have been and the Soviet citizens were not as happy as the propaganda claimed. But neither was he on the verge of rebellion. Five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 40% of Russian voters were still willing to support the Communist Party candidate in the 1996 presidential election. Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, right, are welcomed to London by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1993. Photo: Neil Munns/PA Gorbachev’s story, in fact, is a good example of the occasional importance of the personal factor in human history. As secretary general, he was one of the most powerful men in the world. He could have remained in office for years had he not chosen the path of reform. The son of Maria (née Gopkalo) and Sergei Gorbachev, he was born in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. His paternal grandfather was the chairman of the first collective farm in the area and a member of the party. his father was a tractor driver. Misha, as Michael was known, was trained locally and helped in the summer with the harvest. An intelligent and ambitious boy, when he left school he applied to enter the law school of the prestigious Moscow State University. The five years he spent there from 1950 marked him as something of an intellectual, although a contemporary with whom he shared rooms, the Czech Zdenek Mlynar, recalled that a favorite quote of Gorbachev’s came from Hegel: “Truth is always concrete.” He used the expression to highlight the gap between what the professors said about Soviet life and the reality on the ground. Stalin’s death occurred on March 5, 1953, halfway through Gorbachev’s time at the university. Although both of his grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s – one of them sent to a labor camp in Siberia for “sabotaging” socialism – Gorbachev reacted like most of his contemporaries. deeply moved, he spent the whole night in line to see the dictator’s body in state. The ensuing thaw made his professors more open and interesting, he wrote in his autobiography, but it was not enough to deter him from an orthodox career pattern. The position of first secretary of the Stavropol party organization was a position similar to that of the governor general He was active in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Union, while at university, and after graduating in 1955 he returned to Stavropol to work in the local mobilization and propaganda department. He moved into the party itself and made a rapid rise through its ranks. Within 15 years he was the first secretary of the regional party organization of Stavroupolis. In the top-down, hierarchical structure it was a position similar to the governor-general. Orders were taken from above and delivered from below, without any serious or open discussion of other options. The job gave the holder an almost automatic seat on the party’s central committee, in theory the main policy-making body. At 40, Gorbachev was one of its youngest members. Stavropol was a relatively rich and agriculturally efficient region, and Gorbachev, as the leading regional man, met his predecessors, Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, then near the top of the Soviet system. He also knew Fyodor Kulakov, the man in charge of Soviet agriculture, who seemed destined for the top job, general secretary of the central committee. But Kulakov died suddenly in 1978 and Gorbachev was given the portfolio of agriculture, a job that also gave him a nomination to the central committee’s inner cabinet, the politburo. He was now himself close to the seat of power and the youngest member of an increasingly aging group of men. It saw the semi-senile Brezhnev, driven by vanity and refusing to retire, take the fateful decision with veteran Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov to invade Afghanistan in 1979 without consulting the Politburo. Whatever he thought, Gorbachev was too good an official to oppose the decision. The man he admired was Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev in 1982 and tried to speed up economic growth by raising the rate of investment and giving businesses limited permission to keep some of their profits. Andropov also hoped to channel investment away from the military-industrial complex by putting a cap on the arms race. But his health failed and he died in 1984, after only 14 months in power. Gorbachev should have been the obvious successor, but the politburo chose another sick figure, Konstantin Chernenko. The old guard thought Gorbachev was still too young. When Chernenko died a year later, Gorbachev’s turn as general secretary was almost inevitable. He did not come to power with a plan, telling some colleagues that “things” cannot continue as they are His colleagues had no idea that he would start a chain of dramatic reforms. But he didn’t either. He did not come to power with a plan. He had told some of his contemporaries, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he was to appoint as foreign minister, that “things” could not go on as they were. What he was referring to was the economy, where defense spending was growing faster than any other sector. At first, he continued on the Andropov path of controlled reform, or uskorenye (acceleration). But there were two differences. Gorbachev knew that a group of younger people in the middle ranks of the central party apparatus in Moscow – as well as in the academic institutes – thought like him. He could count on their support. He decided to become more open to the problems of Soviet society by traveling around the country, admitting the difficulties and listening to ordinary people complain. Uskorenia changed to perestroika. The hope was that the Soviet people, in return for the leadership’s new honesty, would join a new social contract and work harder and more efficiently. Gorbachev ideologues described it as the “human factor”, an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czech and Slovak reformers tried to introduce “socialism with a human face”. It also sought to gain greater consensus by allowing writers and journalists to reopen many taboo issues. The gaps in official Soviet history — such as Stalin’s…