Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev     (Lawyer)
Born	Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev 1931-03-02 Privolnoye, North Caucasus Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian
Alma mater	Moscow State University
Children	Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya
Spouse	Raisa Gorbachova
Founder of	Green Cross International
Member of	Club de Madrid, Club of Rome
Party	Soviet Communist Party, Independent, Social Democratic Party, Union of Social Democrats
President of the Soviet Union In office 15 March 1990 - 25 December 1991  General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union In office 11 March 1985 - 24 August 1991  Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union In office 25 May 1989 - 15 March 1990  Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union In office 1 October 1988 - 25 May 1989  First Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee of the Communist Party In office 10 April 1970 - 4 December 1978  Full member of the 25th 26th 27th 28th Politburo In office 21 October 1980 - 24 August 1991  Candidate member of the 25th Politburo In office 27 November 1979 - 21 October 1980  Member of the 25th 26th 27th 28th Secretariat In office 27 November 1978 - 24 August 1991  Full member of the 24th 25th 26th 27th 28th Central Committee In office 9 April 1971 - 24 August 1991

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman. He was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 until 1991 when the party was dissolved. He served as the country's head of state from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991 (titled as Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and as President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991). He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born after the 1917 October Revolution.

Background

Mikhail Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian–Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party, and soon became very active within it.

Career

In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief "interregna" of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in Western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.

Policies

Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, removed the constitutional role of the Communist Party in governing the state, and inadvertently led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and the Harvey Prize in 1992, as well as honorary doctorates from various universities.

In September 2008, Mikhail Gorbachev and business oligarch Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent. This was Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a political party, having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social Democrats] in 2007.

 

A Quote by Mikhail Gorbachev

Page	Quote	Date
Chernobyl disaster	“The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”	2006

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine/Preparation	“Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.” Gorbachev continued that “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years.” To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.”	Brookings Institution Russia Beyond	November 2014
NATO	“Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.” Gorbachev continued that “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years.” To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.”	Brookings Institution Russia Beyond	November 2014
NATO	“We had a moment in history, between 1988 and 1991, where we could have worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to make his vision of perestroika succeed. Instead, we allowed him to fail, without any real plan on how we would live with what emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Save for a short period of time during the Second World War where we needed the Soviet Union to defeat Germany and Japan, we have been in a continual state of political conflict with the Soviet Union. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, we viewed the Russian Federation more as a defeated enemy that we needed to keep down, than a friend in need of a helping hand up.”	Scott Ritter	2021

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References

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