Who Was Mikhail Gorbachev?

Who Was Mikhail Gorbachev?

Today marks the 95th birthday of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was born on 2 March 1931, and unfortunately passed on 30 August 2022. Mikhail Gorbachev was a prominent member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991. He was best known for implementing the policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring), which were aimed at reforming the socialist system in the Soviet Union and ultimately contributed to the end of the Cold War.

The first question for this piece was to ask, “Who was Mikhail Gorbachev?” Was Mikhail Gorbachev really a Communist or it was by default or design that he found himself being a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)?

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 3 March 1931 in the village of Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai. Gorbachev’s Ukrainian mother, Maria Panteleyevna, was a devout Orthodox Christian and had her baby, initially named Viktor, secretly christened ‘Mikhail’. During the early 1930s, the then leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, initiated an intense policy of systematic socialisation. Part of implementing Stalin’s vision was rapid industrialisation, collectivisation of farming and rooting out “class enemies”. The result of Stalin’s policies was widespread famine in the Ukraine between 1931 and 1933, in which Gorbachev’s paternal uncles and aunt died. Later, when the state sought ‘enemies of the people’, both of his grandfathers were arrested and sent to gulags.

Gorbachev became an active member of the Komsomol Soviet youth organisation, as a student, quickly rising to become leader of his local group. His incredible work ethic saw him and his father, Sergey, often spending 20 hours a day in the fields during the summer. Accordingly, in 1948 they harvested over 80 tonnes of grain, resulting in his father Sergey being awarded the Order of Lenin and Mikhail receiving the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.

Gorbachev joined Moscow’s law school in 1950, wherein he gained a reputation for being a mediator during conflict and outspoken in class. It was during this time, in 1950, that Gorbachev officially became a member of the Communist Party. On several occasions, he showed he was unafraid of questioning Soviet authority. He did not agree with the Soviet legal rule that confessions meant guilt, arguing that confessions could be forced. During this time, he also became close friends with Zdeněk Mlynář, a Czechoslovak student who shared his Marxist-Leninist beliefs and concerns about Stalin. Mlynář later became a leading ideologist of the 1968 Prague Spring.

Gorbachev returned to his home province of Stavropol after graduating to lead the regional Komsomol. By 1970 he had risen to the role of First Secretary of Stavropol, giving him significant power over the region. In 1971, Gorbachev became the youngest member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and in 1978, he moved to Moscow with his wife Raisa and daughter Irina, when he was made a Secretary of the Central Committee, which was a promotion that came with huge changes in his life.

When the elderly and ailing leader of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Chernenko, died on 10 March 1985, after having been too ill to attend meetings of the Politburo, Gorbachev was recommended for the role. He was unanimously voted as the Soviet Union’s eighth General Secretary following the support he received from Andrei Gromyko, a well-seasoned member of the Politburo, who carried sway within the Central Committee, suggesting Gorbachev as Chernenko’s successor.

Gorbachev took a radically new approach to governing than his predecessors. None of the Soviet leadership expected him to be as radical a reformer as he turned out to be. Since he knew he needed the support of the Politburo before making any significant changes, within a year he had reshuffled the Soviet leadership, promoting his allies into greater authority. In the first eighteen months after coming to power, Gorbachev pursued relatively orthodox policies of “uskorenie” (acceleration), which achieved modest results. Gorbachev then introduced his notable policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring), which allowed greater freedom of cultural expression and freedom of the media.

In late 1986, he released the dissident Andrei Sakharov from exile and eased censorship rules, generating a wave of discussion about previously forbidden topics such as Stalin’s great purges of 1936–38 and the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Gorbachev also made attempts to democratise the political processes by introducing the secret ballot and multi-party elections. However, the resulting explosion of open discussion occurred just as failed economic reforms were contributing to increased shortages of basic consumer goods. Ultimately, instead of revitalising the socialist system, Gorbachev’s liberal reforms triggered discontent and protest.

Consequently, his reforms became deeply unpopular with hardliners and bureaucrats in the Communist Party, who were unwilling to loosen their grip on the economy of the Soviet Union, thus he faced a short-lived coup in August 1991. Alongside instituting a radical new programme of cultural, electoral and diplomatic reform, Gorbachev openly supported the reforms of socialist countries in the Eastern European bloc, thus leading to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia democratically electing non-communist administrations between 1989 and 1990. Furthermore, Gorbachev agreed to a phased withdrawal of Soviet troops from each of those countries. Ultimately, in 1990, Gorbachev agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany, thus tearing down the so-called “Iron Curtain”, which had divided the globe during the Cold War.

Besides his policies of internal reform, Gorbachev sought better relations with the United States, which was the Soviet Union’s Cold War adversary. He began for instance, in 1987, by signing the INF Treaty with United States’ President Ronald Reagan that led to an agreement that both countries would destroy their remaining intermediate-range nuclear arsenals. Gorbachev also oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from occupied Afghanistan between 1988 and 1989, since by that time, the Soviet armed forces had lost some 15,000 soldiers and had failed to put into place a sympathetic regime. According to geostrategic analysis, the Soviet Union had little reason to remain in Afghanistan except to prevent loss of face on the international stage.

As regards Palestine, the Soviet Union had suspended diplomatic relations with Israel during the Six Day War in 1967, but Gorbachev reopened ties following his elevation to power. Gorbachev’s pro-Zionist leaning was evident while serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), long before his Presidency of the Soviet Union. During that period diplomatic relations with Israel were terminated, but Gorbachev urged Yasser Arafat to suspend the PLO’s (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) armed struggle and instead “recognise” the existence of Israel. And when he re-established Soviet Union’s ties years later, it was clear that he had no inclination to advance the Palestinians just struggle for liberation, apart from measly rhetoric about a “negotiated settlement”, knowing full well that opening the floodgates to millions of Soviet Jews would boost Israel’s demographic challenges. In a matter of a few years more than 2 million migrated to Israel laying their hands on Palestinian land and setting up illegal settlements.

Following an open attack on his reforms in major Soviet newspapers and other media platforms, Gorbachev convened the historic 19th All-Union Party Conference of the CPSU in 1988, wherein delegates were forced to sharply reduce the party apparatus and eliminate key mechanisms of control over economic enterprises. The party conference also opened the CPSU to direct competition from outsiders with the creation of a new bicameral legislature, thus using his powers as general secretary to fatally weaken the very foundation of his own power, the Communist Party.

In a special election to the Congress in March 1989, numerous highly placed Communist Party functionaries lost their positions, while key proponents of reform, including Sakharov, won overwhelmingly. Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s archenemy, who was then a disgraced former Politburo member, obtained 89 percent of the vote in Moscow. When each of the Soviet Union’s fifteen Republics held their individual elections in 1990, they brought to power anti-Soviet leaders, including Yeltsin, who became president of Russia in 1991. With the Communist Party in retreat, the possibilities for the future seemed limitless, as naïve visions such as anarchism suddenly seemed possible. On Christmas Day in 1991, Gorbachev resigned, as the final leader of the Soviet superpower, following his resignation as general secretary of the Communist Party on 22 August 1991.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, reversed the course laid down by Stalin and his successors in a series of somewhat idealistic and incoherent steps he called “perestroika” and “glasnost”. However, he saw his work as a return to the principles of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and an attempt to rebuild the failing command economy and humanise the rigorous communist doctrine. In a 2011 television show dedicated to the 25th anniversary of perestroika, he said, “In a word, freedom came to the USSR, to Russia … in theory and in practice, we tried to get back to Lenin’s legacy”.

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the economy was not in crisis and could probably have continued functioning indefinitely. His own economic policies, which led to macroeconomic imbalances, soaring inflation, rampant shortages, the stripping of assets of large firms, and a rapid buildup of foreign debt, destabilised the economy and produced a genuine crisis by 1990 and 1991. The hardships that resulted from Gorbachev’s failure to pursue an effective economic program generated widespread social discontent.

In the late 1980s, he stood as a political colossus, but his feet turned out to be made of clay, as many Russians remained deeply frustrated by his rule, which took away their country’s superpower status. Soviet economic reforms became a much more formidable challenge. Gorbachev could not bring himself to adopt radical free-market reforms as Deng Xiaoping had implemented in China at the end of the 1970s, without relinquishing the power of the Communist Party. Gorbachev sought instead to reform, rather than discard, the Soviet economic model. He gradually came to believe that far-reaching political liberalisation would be a prerequisite for economic advancement.

The economic hardships that many in the Soviet Union experienced during Gorbachev’s final years in power, and the economic upheavals that occurred in every former Soviet republic after 1991, resulted in extremely low favourability ratings for Gorbachev all over the former Soviet Union. The freer flow of information under glasnost contributed to the decline of central control and the stream of disclosures about the Soviet past and about the deficiencies of Soviet society had a cumulative impact of delegitimising the Soviet regime in the eyes of many Russians as well as non-Russians. Glasnost also had a profound impact on Soviet elites, who were suddenly free to talk about the regime’s past iniquities and the Soviet Union’s failure to measure up to the other developed world.

The outpouring of criticism about the continued shortcomings of Soviet life, eroded the morale of elites who had previously been loyal to the Communist Party-led socialist system. Even though Gorbachev believed that these trends would ultimately benefit his reforms and strengthen the Soviet Union, a hardline backlash began to emerge in the CPSU. His sporadic attempts to return to politics found no support even among his once most-ardent sympathisers. When Gorbachev stepped down as Soviet president and declared the Soviet Union dead, he declared his own political death. For Putin, Gorbachev was a weak leader who initiated the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Sources:
Wikipedia.
Jonathan Steele Interview, “Mikhail Gorbachev: I Should Have Abandoned the Communist Party Earlier”, Guardian, 16 August 2011.
Peta Stamper, “10 Facts About Mikhail Gorbachev”, History Hit, 22 April 2022.
Mansur Mirovalev, “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Rise and Fall of the Last Soviet Leader”, Al Jazeera, 30 August 2022.
Jonathan Davis, “Mikhail Gorbachev: Five Things You Need to Know”, The Conversation, 31 August 2022.
Lucan Ahmad Way, “Gorbachev’s Enduring Legacy”, Journal of Democracy, September 2022.
Iqbal Jassat, “Mikhail Gorbachev’s Legacy: Conversion from Communism to Zionism and Capitalism”, The African, 1 September 2022.
Mark Kramer, “Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022): Magnificent Achievements, Monumental Failures”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 2 September 2022.
Miller Center, “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Last Soviet Leader”, University of Virginia: Miller Center, 2025.
CNN Editorial Research, “Mikhail Gorbachev Fast Facts”, Cable News Network (CNN), 11 February 2026.

Castro Khwela
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