Gorbachev Who Redirected Course Of 20Th Century Dies At 91

Alongside Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev was a key player in a world drama that many considered impossible and, for those who lived through it, seemed almost surreal. Under Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall came down, thousands of political prisoners were freed, and millions of people who had only known communism got their first real taste of freedom. But he was unable to control the forces he unleashed – and ultimately fought a losing battle to save a crumbling empire. Gorbachev died on Tuesday in a Moscow hospital at the age of 91. Although little known outside Sovietologist circles before he became leader in 1985, he quickly became a dominant and charismatic figure on the world stage. The mottled purple mark on his bald pate made him instantly recognizable, and his vigor stood in stark contrast to the recent run of aging and barely discernible Kremlin leaders. His vision to transform the Soviet Union into a more humane and flexible country had the power of the time. By 1990, he had won the Nobel Prize for his “leading role” in ending the Cold War and reducing nuclear tensions. But a year later, he was the sad and bewildered embodiment of failure. The country had collapsed in his hands, and at home he was mocked, scorned and increasingly shunned as irrelevant. His power hopelessly eroded by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, Gorbachev spent his last months in power watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on 25 December 1991 and the Soviet Union was forgotten a day later. Many of the changes, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union, bore no resemblance to the transformation Gorbachev envisioned when he became Soviet leader in March 1985. By the end of his administration, he was powerless to stop the whirlwind he had sown. 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 reforms that were necessary for the country and Europe and the world,” Gorbachev told The Associated Press in a 1992 interview shortly after leaving power. “I’m often asked, would I do it all over again if I had it to do over? Yes indeed. And with more persistence and determination,” he said. The Russians blamed him for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – a once formidable superpower whose territory was split into 15 separate nations. His 1996 run for president was a national joke, garnering less than 1 percent of the vote. In 1997, he resorted to making a TV commercial for Pizza Hut to raise money for his charity. His former allies abandoned him and made him a scapegoat for the country’s woes. “In the ad, he should take a pizza, cut it into 15 slices like he divided our country, and then show how to put it back together,” quipped Anatoly Lukyanov, a one-time Gorbachev supporter. Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. He wanted to improve it. The death of Mikhail Gorbachev Immediately after taking power, he 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 he had long been frustrated that in a country with vast natural resources, tens of millions lived in poverty. “Our society was suffocated in the grip of a bureaucratic system of command,” wrote Gorbachev. “Doomed to serve the ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it overworked itself.” Once started, one move led to another: He freed political prisoners, allowed open debate and multi-candidate elections, gave his countrymen freedom to travel, ended religious oppression, reduced nuclear arsenals, forged closer ties with the West, and did not resist the fall of communist regimes in Eastern European satellite states. But the powers he unleashed quickly got out of his control. Long-suppressed ethnic tensions flared, sparking wars and unrest in trouble spots such as the South Caucasus region. Strikes and labor unrest followed price increases and shortages of consumer goods. At one of the low points of his tenure, Gorbachev authorized a crackdown on restive Baltic republics in early 1991. The violence turned many intellectuals and reformers against him. The competitive elections also produced a new crop 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 renovating this country and bringing about fundamental changes in the international community turned out to be much more complicated than originally expected,” Gorbachev told the nation as he stepped down. “However, let’s recognize what has been achieved so far. Society has gained freedom. he has liberated himself politically and spiritually. And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully mastered, partly because we have not yet learned how 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. Both his grandfathers were farmers, presidents of collective farms and members of the Communist Party, as was his father. Despite the party’s stellar credentials, Gorbachev’s family did not emerge unscathed from the terror unleashed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: Both grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned for alleged anti-Soviet activities. But, rarely at that time, both were eventually released. In 1941, when Gorbachev was 10 years old, his father went to war, along with most of the other men from Privolnoye. Meanwhile, the Nazis pushed across 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 country boys whose father returned. At age 15, Gorbachev helped his father drive a combine after school and during the region’s blistering, dusty summers. His performance earned him the Red Medal of Labour, an unusual distinction for a 17-year-old. This award and his parents’ party 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 shame of his grandparents’ arrests, which were ignored in light of his exemplary communist behavior. In his memoirs, Gorbachev describes himself as something of a misfit 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 official, he was assigned to explain the 20th Party Congress that revealed Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s suppression of millions to local party activists. He said he was met first by “deathly silence” and then disbelief. “They said, ‘We don’t believe 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 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. These trips had a profound effect on his thinking, shaking his belief in the superiority of Soviet-style socialism. “I was haunted by the question: Why was the standard of living in our country lower than in other developed countries?” he recalled in his memoirs. “It seemed that our elderly leaders were not particularly concerned about our decidedly lower standard of living, our unsatisfying lifestyle and our lack 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: Andropov, Gorbachev’s mentor, and Konstantin Chernenko. It was not until March 1985, when Chernenko died, that the party finally chose a younger man to lead the country. Gorbachev was 54 years old. His tenure was full of difficult times, including a poorly planned campaign against alcohol, the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. But beginning in November 1985, Gorbachev began a series of high-profile summits with world leaders, particularly US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, that led to unprecedented, deep reductions in US and Soviet nuclear arsenals. After years of watching a parade of stiff leaders in the Kremlin, Western leaders practically swooned over the charming, burly Gorbachev and his elegant, 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 many Russians found Raisa Gorbachev ostentatious and arrogant. Although the rest of the world benefited from the changes brought about by Gorbachev, the rickety Soviet economy collapsed in the process, bringing with it enormous economic hardship for the country’s 290 million people. In the final days of the Soviet Union, economic decline accelerated to…

Gorbachev Who Redirected Course Of 20Th Century Dies At 91

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