Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union, serving as head of its Communist Party from 1985 and as its only president from 1990 until the state dissolved at the end of 1991. His reforms, known as glasnost and perestroika, loosened censorship and one-party control, and his refusal to use force to hold eastern Europe helped end the Cold War. He remains one of the most divisive figures of the twentieth century: admired in much of the world as a peacemaker, and blamed by many in Russia for the collapse of their country.

Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, into a peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian descent. Both his grandfathers were arrested during Joseph Stalin's purges of the 1930s, and the village was occupied by German forces in 1942. As a teenager he worked on combine harvesters and won a state award for the harvest of 1948, which helped him gain a place to study law at Moscow State University. There he joined the Communist Party and met Raisa Titarenko, whom he married in 1953.

Returning to Stavropol in 1955, he made his career in the Komsomol and then the party, becoming the region's party chief in 1970. Senior leaders who holidayed at the spa towns of the area came to know him, among them Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB. In 1978 Gorbachev was brought to Moscow as the Central Committee secretary for agriculture, and he became a full member of the Politburo in 1980, its youngest member.

After the deaths in quick succession of Leonid Brezhnev, Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo chose Gorbachev as general secretary on 11 March 1985, at the age of 54. The economy he inherited was stagnating, burdened by military spending and the war in Afghanistan. His early measures, including a strict campaign against alcohol, aimed to make the existing system work better rather than replace it.

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986, and the official silence of the first days, convinced him that secrecy was itself a problem. Under glasnost, or openness, censorship was relaxed, banned books and films appeared, crimes of the Stalin era were openly discussed and many political prisoners, including the physicist Andrei Sakharov, were freed. Perestroika, or restructuring, gave enterprises more independence and allowed small private cooperatives. In 1989 the Soviet Union held its first partly competitive national elections, to a new Congress of People's Deputies, whose debates were broadcast live.

Gorbachev spoke of "new thinking" in foreign policy. He held a series of summits with the United States president Ronald Reagan, and in 1987 they signed the INF Treaty, which eliminated a whole class of nuclear missiles. Soviet troops left Afghanistan by February 1989. Gorbachev also told the communist governments of eastern Europe that Moscow would no longer intervene to keep them in power. During the Revolutions of 1989, when communist rule collapsed from Poland to Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Wall was opened, Soviet forces stayed in their barracks. He then accepted the reunification of Germany inside NATO in 1990. That year he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

At home, the reforms produced turmoil. The economy worsened, with shortages and inflation, and the new freedoms allowed national movements to grow in the republics, above all in the Baltic states, where Lithuania declared independence in March 1990. Soviet troops used deadly force against demonstrators in Tbilisi in 1989, in Baku in 1990 and in Vilnius in January 1991; Gorbachev denied ordering these actions, but critics held him responsible. In March 1990 the party gave up its constitutional monopoly on power and Gorbachev was elected president of the Soviet Union by the Congress, while his rival Boris Yeltsin built a power base as leader of the Russian republic.

In August 1991, the day before a new treaty loosening the union was due to be signed, hardliners in his own government placed Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and declared a state of emergency. The coup collapsed within three days in the face of resistance led by Yeltsin in Moscow, but Gorbachev's authority never recovered. One republic after another declared independence, and in December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed to replace the Soviet Union with a loose Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union was complete.

Out of office, Gorbachev set up a foundation in Moscow, lectured abroad and helped found the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. When he stood for the Russian presidency in 1996, he won only about half of one percent of the vote. Raisa died in 1999. He criticised aspects of Vladimir Putin's rule, though he also supported the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He died in Moscow on 30 August 2022, aged 91, and was buried beside his wife; Putin did not attend the funeral.

Supporters, including most Western governments and many Russian liberals, credit Gorbachev with ending the Cold War peacefully, reducing the danger of nuclear war, freeing eastern Europe and giving the people of the Soviet Union freedoms of speech and political choice they had never had. They point out that he repeatedly declined to use large-scale force to save his power. Critics, especially in Russia, where polls have often ranked him among the country's least popular leaders, blame him for economic chaos, the loss of superpower status and the break-up of the union, which left millions of Russians outside Russia. Others criticise him from the opposite direction, arguing that he wanted to reform communism rather than abandon it, and that he hesitated too long over economic change and national self-determination. Historians broadly agree that the outcome was not what he intended: he set out to renew the Soviet system and ended up presiding over its end.