[Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. What he
wanted to do was improve it. Soon after taking power, Gorbachev 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. ]
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FORMER SOVIET LEADER MIKHAIL GORBACHEV HAS DIED, RUSSIAN MEDIA REPORT
 
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Jim Heintz
August 30, 2022
Boston Globe
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_ Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. What he
wanted to do was improve it. Soon after taking power, Gorbachev 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. _

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev waves from the Red Square tribune
during a Revolution Day celebration, in Moscow, Soviet Union, Tuesday,
Nov. 7, 1989., Boris Yurchenko/Associated Press

 

MOSCOW (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev, who as the last leader of the
Soviet Union waged a losing battle to salvage a crumbling empire but
produced extraordinary reforms that led to the end of the Cold War,
died Tuesday. He was 91.

The Central Clinical Hospital said in a statement that Gorbachev died
after a long illness. No other details were given.

Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a
breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and
resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the
freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination and the
end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.

His decline was humiliating. His power hopelessly sapped by an
attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in
office watching republic after republic declare independence until he
resigned on Dec. 25, 1991. The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion
a day later.

A quarter-century after the collapse, Gorbachev told The Associated
Press that he had not considered using widespread force to try to keep
the USSR together because he feared chaos in a nuclear country.

“The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And it would have
immediately pushed the country into a civil war,” he said.

Many of the changes, including the Soviet breakup, bore no resemblance
to the transformation that Gorbachev had envisioned when he became the
Soviet leader in March 1985.

By the end of his rule he was powerless to halt the whirlwind he had
sown. Yet 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 started the reforms that were necessary
for the country and for Europe and the world,” Gorbachev told The AP
in a 1992 interview shortly after he left office.

“I am often asked, would I have started it all again if I had to
repeat it? Yes, indeed. And with more persistence and
determination,” he said.

Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the
Cold War and spent his later years collecting accolades and awards
from all corners of the world. Yet he was widely despised at home.

Russians blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union — a
once-fearsome superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate
nations. His former allies deserted him and made him a scapegoat for
the country’s troubles.

His run for president in 1996 was a national joke, and he polled less
than 1 percent of the vote.

In 1997, he resorted to making a TV ad for Pizza Hut to earn money for
his charitable foundation, His former allies deserted him and made him
a scapegoat for the country’s troubles.

“In the ad, he should take a pizza, divide it into 15 slices like he
divided up our country, and then show how to put it back together
again,” quipped Anatoly Lukyanov, a one-time Gorbachev supporter.

Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. What he wanted
to do was improve it.

Soon after taking power, Gorbachev 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 immense natural resources, tens of millions were living in
poverty.

“Our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command
system,” Gorbachev wrote. “Doomed to serve ideology and bear the
heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost.”

Once he began, one move led to another: He freed political prisoners,
allowed open debate and multi-candidate elections, gave his countrymen
freedom to travel, halted religious oppression, reduced nuclear
arsenals, established closer ties with the West and did not resist the
fall of Communist regimes in Eastern European satellite states.

But the forces he unleashed quickly escaped his control.

Long-suppressed ethnic tensions flared, sparking wars and unrest in
trouble spots such as the southern Caucasus region. Strikes and labor
unrest followed price increases and shortages of consumer goods.

In one of the low points of his tenure, Gorbachev sanctioned a
crackdown on the restive Baltic republics in early 1991.

The violence turned many intellectuals and reformers against him.
Competitive elections also produced a new crop of populist politicians
who challenged Gorbachev’s policies and authority.

Chief among them was his former protege 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 proved to be much
more complex than originally anticipated,” Gorbachev told the nation
as he stepped down.

“However, let us acknowledge what has been achieved so far. Society
has acquired freedom; it has been freed politically and spiritually.
And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully
come to grips with in part because we still have not 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 March 2, 1931, in the village
of Privolnoye in southern Russia. Both his grandfathers were peasants,
collective farm chairmen and members of the Communist Party, as was
his father.

Despite stellar party credentials, Gorbachev’s family did not emerge
unscathed from the terror unleashed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin:
Both grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned for allegedly
anti-Soviet activities.

But, rare in that period, both were eventually freed. In 1941, when
Gorbachev was 10, his father went off 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 was over, young Gorbachev was one of the few village boys
whose father returned. By age 15, Gorbachev was helping his father
drive a combine harvester after school and during the region’s
blistering, dusty summers.

His performance earned him the order of the Red Banner of Labor, an
unusual distinction for a 17-year-old. That prize and the party
background of his parents helped him land 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 disgrace of his grandfathers’ arrests, which were
overlooked in light of his exemplary Communist conduct.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev described himself as something of a maverick
as he advanced through the party ranks, sometimes bursting out with
criticism of the Soviet system and its leaders.

His early career coincided with the “thaw” begun by Nikita
Khrushchev. As a young Communist propaganda official, he was tasked
with explaining the 20th Party Congress that revealed Soviet dictator
Josef Stalin’s repression of millions to local party activists. He
said he was met first by “deathly silence,” then disbelief.

“They said: ‘We don’t believe it. It can’t be. You want to
blame everything on Stalin now that he’s dead,’” he told The
Associated Press in a 2006 interview.

He was a true if unorthodox believer in socialism. He was elected to
the powerful party Central Committee in 1971, took over Soviet
agricultural policy in 1978, and became a full Politburo member in
1980.

Along the way he was able to travel to the West, to Belgium, Germany,
France, Italy and Canada. Those trips had a profound effect on his
thinking, shaking his belief in the superiority of Soviet-style
socialism.

“The question haunted me: Why was the standard of living in our
country lower than in other developed countries?” he recalled in his
memoirs. “It seemed that our aged leaders were not especially
worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our
unsatisfactory way of life, and our falling behind in the field 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: Yuri
Andropov, Gorbachev’s mentor, and Konstantin Chernenko.

It wasn’t until March 1985, when Chernenko died, that the party
finally chose a younger man to lead the country: Gorbachev. He was 54
years old.

His tenure was filled with rocky periods, including a poorly conceived
anti-alcohol campaign, the Soviet military withdrawal from
Afghanistan, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

But starting in November 1985, Gorbachev began a series of
attention-grabbing summit meetings with world leaders, especially U.S.
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, which led to unprecedented,
deep reductions in the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals.

After years of watching a parade of stodgy leaders in the Kremlin,
Western leaders practically swooned over the charming, vigorous
Gorbachev and his stylish, brainy 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 showy and
arrogant.

Although the rest of the world benefited from the changes Gorbachev
wrought, the rickety Soviet economy collapsed in the process, bringing
with it tremendous economic hardship for the country’s 290 million
people.

In the final days of the Soviet Union, the economic decline
accelerated into a steep skid. Hyper-inflation robbed most older
people of their life’s savings. Factories shut down. Bread lines
formed.

And popular hatred for Gorbachev and his wife Raisa grew. But the
couple won sympathy in summer 1999 when it was revealed that Raisa
Gorbachev was dying of leukemia.

During her final days, Gorbachev spoke daily with television
reporters, and the lofty-sounding, wooden politician of old was
suddenly seen as an emotional family man surrendering to deep grief.

Gorbachev worked on the Gorbachev Foundation, which he created to
address global priorities in the post-Cold War period, and with the
Green Cross foundation, which was formed in 1993 to help cultivate
“a more harmonious relationship between humans and the
environment.”

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev gestured while speaking to
Lithuanians at the Lenin monument in Vilnius, Soviet Union, Jan. 11,
1990. Victor Yurchenko/Associated Press

Gorbachev took the helm of the small United Social Democratic Party in
2000 in hopes it could fill the vacuum left by the Communist Party,
which he said had failed to reform into a modern leftist party after
the breakup of the Soviet Union. He resigned from the chairmanship in
2004.

He continued to comment on Russian politics as a senior statesman —
even if many of his countrymen were no longer interested in what he
had to say.

“The crisis in our country will continue for some time, possibly
leading to even greater upheaval,” Gorbachev wrote in a memoir in
1996. “But Russia has irrevocably chosen the path of freedom, and no
one can make it turn back to totalitarianism.”

Gorbachev veered between criticism and mild praise for Russian
President Vladimir Putin, who has been assailed for backtracking on
the democratic achievements of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras.

He said Putin had done much to restore stability and prestige to
Russia after the tumultuous decade following the Soviet collapse. He
did, however, protest growing limitations on media freedom, and in
2006 bought one of Russia’s last investigative newspapers, Novaya
Gazeta, with a businessman associate.

“We should — this is one of our goals — promote the
newspaper’s qualitative development in the interests of democratic
values,” he said, tacitly criticizing the Kremlin’s efforts to
bring Novaya Gazeta and other independent media outlets to heel.

Gorbachev ventured into other new areas in his 70s, winning awards and
kudos around the world. He won a Grammy in 2004 along with former U.S.
President Bill Clinton and Italian actress Sophia Loren for their
recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and the United Nations
named him a Champion of the Earth in 2006 for his environmental
advocacy.

Gorbachev had a daughter, Irina, and two granddaughters.

The official news agency Tass reported that Gorbachev will be buried
at Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife.

___

Vladimir Isachenkov and Kate de Pury in Moscow contributed.

* Mikhail Gorbachev
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* 1931-2022; Soviet Union; Glasnost; Perestroika; Nobel Peace Prize;
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