Mikhail Sergeyivich Gorbachev was, among many things, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and, more than anyone else, responsible for the abolition of that post and that nation. He was born in the Russian Caucasus in 1931 and followed what had become, for his generation, a standard path for Soviet politicians. He had the obligatory experience of manual work as a machine operator on a collective farm, and indeed was educated at Stavropol Agricultural Institute, but also, more significantly, at Moscow State University where he graduated in law. He rapidly moved into party work, and held a series of posts in district, regional and national party organizations, rising in step with his mentor, Yuri Andropov, Soviet leader between 1982 and 1984. When Andropov died Gorbachev was a potential successor as leader, having joined the Politburo at the unusually young age of 49 in 1980. He had to wait through the brief reign of a more conservative and older leader, Konstantin Chernenko, but finally became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985, giving him de facto power, and official head of state, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, in 1988.
Gorbachev was, without doubt, passionately convinced of the need for widespread reform in the Soviet Union, and was driven by an acceptance of the appalling state of the Soviet economy. In particular he realized that the Soviet Union’s combative foreign and defence policy was far beyond the economy’s capacity. He accepted too that existing work habits and industrial socialization had to be changed, incentives for work introduced, and the paralysing weight of party bureaucracy lifted.
These matters he tried to change with his policies of glasnost, perestroika and the fresh approach symbolized by the new thinking in foreign affairs. But he was only a reformer. At no stage did he seriously doubt communism, the role of the party, or the need for powerful and direct state control. Each of his reforms, for example the introduction of very limited democracy inside the single-party system, simply increased the demand for more, without materially affecting the social and economic conditions of the ordinary system. Gorbachev’s rule, from 1985 until his resignation on 26 December 1991 after the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) which embraced 11 of the 15 former Soviet republics, was a classic demonstration of the argument that a repressive regime cannot relax slightly: there is no half-way house between effective totalitarianism and genuine freedom. His commitment to the communist party did not waver even after the attempted coup d’état against him in August 1991. It will never be clear how much of the change in the last years of the Soviet Union was really to his credit, because many argue that any leader, faced with the economic and foreign policy situation of 1985, would have had to act in much the same way. What is clear is that he was never in control either of political forces or of strategy during those last years. His demise came because actual conditions worsened to the point that Soviet citizens were looking back on the Brezhnev era as ‘the golden years’, because he could not persuade people desperate for some improvement in their material welfare to accept the sacrifices necessary to achieve success for his reforms and, perhaps above all, because he was loyal to the party which the mass of the population had come to fear. However, that party never accepted that he was essentially faithful to them, and he has had no part to play in the renewed political success of the mildly reformed Communist Party in opposition.
This is the complete article, containing 609 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
