Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration. It was not the objective he set himself when he was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist party in March 1985, nor did he predict or plan the way the cold war would end, the haemorrhaging of the Communist party, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany or the break-up of the Soviet Union itself.
What distinguished Gorbachev from previous Soviet leaders was that he started a process of reform and did not try to reverse it once it threatened to spin out of control. The great facilitator, he carried on, even to the point of resigning with dignity as his power faded away.
In the aftermath of his downfall, as his successor Boris Yeltsin stumbled into market economics, it became fashionable in the west to sneer at Gorbachev as “just another communist at heart”. He was called a failure because he had not been willing to liberalise state-controlled prices, privatise industry and open the Soviet economy to outside forces as fast as the emerging Russian elite or Yeltsin’s rightwing western advisers wanted. He was ridiculed for trying to “reform” communism when he should have recognised that it was dead.
The charges were unfair – as well as inaccurate – since they characterised Gorbachev as an ideologue when he was, in fact, one of the great pragmatists of modern Russian history. The only part that was true was that he tried to “reform” life for Russians. He sought to maintain some form of democratic socialism, with a continuing role for government intervention and a foundation of social justice. Compared with the crony capitalism and chaotic collapse of public services that marked the first years of post-communism in Russia, his goals seem admirable. There were a variety of avenues for developing democracy and introducing a market economy, and his view that the process should be done gradually was legitimate and honourable.
Gorbachev was not alone in failing to predict the demise of the communist system. None of his contemporaries saw the situation any more clearly than he did, nor did western politicians or analysts. As late as 1988 – only three years before the end – Yeltsin was pleading with the Communist party to “rehabilitate” him and give him another chance after he had resigned from the politburo. Rightwing western politicians, among them Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, later claimed that they had brought about the collapse by “standing up to totalitarianism”. But the record suggests that the system self-destructed.
Communism, in practice, was never a monolith. It was constantly evolving. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin knocked away the last props of consent and used terror as the central pillar of regime stability. But in the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, from 1964 to 1982, terror vanished. The system’s stability still rested partly on repression, but also on its ability to provide a secure material environment for the overwhelming majority and a slowly improving standard of living. Much of it was paid for by the export of plentiful oil and gas reserves, but it could have continued under Gorbachev for another 10 or 20 years. There was no overriding urgency for the process of perestroika (“restructuring” or “transformation”) that he set in train. The system was not as efficient as it should have been, and Soviet citizens were not as happy as the propaganda alleged. But nor were they on the verge of revolt. Five years after the Soviet collapse, 40% of Russian voters were still willing to support the Communist party candidate in the 1996 presidential election.
The story of Gorbachev, in fact, is a fine example of the occasional importance of the personal factor in human history. As general secretary, he was one of the world’s most powerful men. He could have remained in office for years had he not chosen the path of reform.
The son of Maria (nee Gopkalo) and Sergey Gorbachev, he was born in the village of Privolnoye, in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. His paternal grandfather was chairman of the area’s first collective farm and an early party member; his father was a tractor driver. Misha, as Mikhail was known, was educated locally and helped out in the summer with the harvest. A bright and ambitious boy, on leaving school he applied to enter the law faculty of the prestigious Moscow State University. The five years he spent there from 1950 marked him out as something of an intellectual, although a contemporary with whom he shared rooms, the Czech Zdenek Mlynar, remembered that a favourite Gorbachev phrase came from Hegel: “Truth is always concrete.” He used the expression to highlight the gap between what lecturers said about Soviet life and the reality on the ground.
Stalin’s death occurred on 5 March 1953, halfway through Gorbachev’s time at university. Although both his grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s – one of them was sent to a Siberian labour camp for “sabotaging” socialism – Gorbachev reacted to the event like most of his contemporaries; deeply moved, he spent all night queuing to see the dictator’s body lying in state. The thaw that followed made his lecturers more open and interesting, he wrote in his autobiography, but it was not enough to turn him off an orthodox career pattern.
He had been active in the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, while at university, and on graduation in 1955 he went back to Stavropol to work in the local agitation and propaganda department. He moved into the party proper, and made a rapid rise through its ranks. Within 15 years he was first secretary of the Stavropol regional party organisation. In the top-down, hierarchical structure it was a post akin to governor-general. Orders were received from above and handed on below, without any serious or open discussion of other options. The job gave the holder an almost automatic seat on the party’s central committee, in theory the main policy-making organ. At 40, Gorbachev was one of its youngest members.
Stavropol was a relatively rich and agriculturally efficient area, and Gorbachev, as the top regional man, got to know his predecessors, Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, by then close to the pinnacle of the Soviet system. He also knew Fyodor Kulakov, the man in charge of Soviet agriculture, who seemed destined for the top job, general secretary of the central committee. But Kulakov died suddenly in 1978, and Gorbachev was given the agriculture portfolio, a job that also gave him candidate membership in the central committee’s inner cabinet, the politburo.
He was now close to the seat of power himself, and the youngest member of an increasingly ageing team of men. He saw the semi-senile Brezhnev, consumed by vanity and refusing to retire, take the fateful decision with the veteran foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and the defence minister Dmitri Ustinov to invade Afghanistan in 1979 without consulting the politburo. Whatever he thought, Gorbachev was too good an official to oppose the decision. The man he admired was Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev in 1982 and tried to accelerate economic growth by raising the rate of investment and giving enterprises limited permission to retain some of their profits.
Andropov also hoped to channel investment away from the military-industrial complex by putting a cap on the arms race. But his health collapsed and he died in 1984, after only 14 months in office. Gorbachev should have been the obvious successor, but the politburo chose another ailing figure, Konstantin Chernenko. The old guard thought Gorbachev was still too young.
When Chernenko died a year later, Gorbachev’s turn as general secretary was almost inevitable.
His colleagues had no idea that he would set off a chain of dramatic reforms. But nor did he. He did not come to power with a plan. He had told some contemporaries, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he was to appoint as foreign minister, that “things” could not continue as they were. What he was referring to was the economy, where defence spending was growing faster than any other sector.
At first, he continued on the Andropov path of controlled reform, or uskorenye (acceleration). But there were two differences. Gorbachev was aware that a swath of younger people in the middle ranks of the party’s central apparatus in Moscow – as well as in the academic institutes – thought like him. He could rely on their support. He decided to become more open about the problems of Soviet society, travelling the country, admitting to difficulties and listening to ordinary people complain. Uskorenye changed to perestroika. The hope was that Soviet people, in return for the leadership’s new honesty, would join a new social contract and work harder and more efficiently.
The Gorbachev ideologues described it as the “human factor”, an echo of the 1968 Prague Spring, when Czech and Slovak reformers tried to introduce “socialism with a human face”. He also sought to win greater consent by allowing writers and journalists to reopen many taboo issues. The blanks in official Soviet history — such as the Stalinist purges and the full horror of the Gulag — could be filled in. Contemporary problems, such as drunkenness, prostitution, homelessness, crime and corruption, could be aired in the press. Known as glasnost, this policy meant the end of censorship.
Unlike Andropov, Gorbachev also resolved to take unilateral steps towards disarmament and accept the demands of western peace activists to dismantle the new generation of medium-range Soviet rockets targeted on western Europe, which had provoked a matching deployment of US Cruise missiles in western Europe targeted on the Soviet Union. In 1986, this policy was put into the context of a new international philosophy. Gorbachev and his close ally, Alexander Yakovlev, argued that the world was interdependent, and that because of the horror of nuclear annihilation, the “universal values of mankind” outweighed any divisions on class lines.
This meant, in essence, that the clash between capitalism and socialism was no longer the fundamental principle of Soviet policy. It also suggested that the concept of nuclear deterrence on which the cold war was based had lost its validity. It won Gorbachev massive support among ordinary people in the west. Politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher were forced onto the defensive. Also in 1986, just a year after coming to power, he signalled that he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. A year later, in 1987, he was saying that eastern European states were free to develop their own roads to socialism.
The weak part of perestroika was the failure of his economic reforms and his refusal to tackle agriculture. In the field of consumer goods and services, he went beyond Andropov in allowing individuals to start small businesses, though these often fell foul of local bureaucrats who refused to give them licences. Frustrated, he increasingly saw the problem as coming from party officials resisting or sabotaging his reforms. He sacked a number of lower-level officials and senior politburo members, though it took him three years to understand that they were being replaced by equally obstructive clones.
This was what led to the second stage of the Gorbachev reforms, as he decided that the system had to change, and not just the men who ran it. “I must tell you frankly,” he told the Polish parliament in 1988, “in the beginning, we did not understand the need, or rather the inevitability, of reforming the political system. Our experience during the first stage of perestroika brought us to it.”
The vehicle chosen was a new Soviet parliament, or Congress of People’s Deputies. Gorbachev summoned a special party conference in June 1988 and persuaded it to accept the idea of a new elected chamber. He wanted the government to be answerable to the new body rather than the party, thus preventing the party from interfering in day-to-day government issues and confining it to a strategic role. “You can’t have two bears in the same cave,” he explained later. Two-thirds of the parliament’s members would be directly elected in a competitive poll. Inevitably, this meant that candidates would be free to campaign and that the old restrictions on freedom of assembly and speech would have to be lifted.
Between January 1989 and the elections in March, Soviet citizens suddenly found themselves free to heckle, debate, shout abuse and criticise the party and government. This was the moment when Gorbachev’s “revolution from above” turned into a “revolution from below”, as thousands took to the streets. At least 30 senior party members failed to get elected. The new congress, when it met in May, produced extraordinary debates. Numerous independents and several anti-communists, such as the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, were elected. For two weeks, people were glued to their television sets, hearing unprecedented criticism of the old system. Among the reformers, a key demand soon became the abolition of article six of the constitution, which guaranteed the Communist party’s monopoly on power. Having conceded the right of independents to be elected to the congress, it was hard for Gorbachev to resist the idea of letting them form their own parties.
The 1989 congress was the turning point, after which Gorbachev was no longer in control of events. Increasingly, too, he became squeezed between those who wanted to move faster and those who resisted change. His troubles grew worse when the newly elected deputies from the Baltic republics, backed up by mass movements, started to call for economic autonomy and political independence. In eastern Europe, similar movements were emerging, starting in Poland with the old Solidarity trade union, which was relegalised and won elections in June 1989.
Gorbachev reacted in amazingly relaxed fashion to the changes in eastern Europe. None of his advisers had predicted that this would be the result of their strategy of non-intervention. They had imagined that reformers within each country’s Communist party would be the main beneficiaries of change. But in eastern Europe the local parties had come overwhelmingly to be seen as traitors to their nations, since they had gone along with Soviet invasions in the 1950s and 60s. Thus, in the first flush of electoral democracy, the communists did badly.
With hindsight, Gorbachev’s views can be seen as naive. His merit was not to try to prevent the changes — even when they started to produce a complete rout of the Soviet position when the Berlin wall came down in November 1989. When Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany insisted on rapid reunification and the absorption of what had been East Germany into Nato the following year, Gorbachev acquiesced. By then, he was beset on so many fronts that he had no chance to reconsider his policies. He was simply swept along by events.
The same was true inside the Soviet Union, which he cared about far more than the future of eastern Europe. He foolishly tried to resist the Baltic states’ drive to independence, instead of seeing that if he accepted they were a special case he might prevent the independence bug from spreading to the other 12 Soviet republics. As a Russian nationalist, it seemed that he could not understand the psychology of other nations. He was particularly shocked when the overwhelming majority in Ukraine voted to leave the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Just as the first three years of Gorbachev’s time as Soviet leader illustrated the occasional importance of an individual in history, the same was true of the last two years. Now, however, the key personality was Yeltsin. Indeed, had it not been for this one man’s driving ambition, Gorbachev might have saved the Soviet Union. But Yeltsin became his bete noire. In a retrospective interview with me in 2011, Gorbachev regretted he had not got Yeltsin out of the way before he became a direct rival: “I was probably too liberal and democratic as regards Yeltsin. I should have sent him as ambassador to Great Britain or maybe a former British colony,” he told me.
A contemporary, and like him a former regional party secretary, Yeltsin did not enjoy being part of the Gorbachev team. He first irritated Gorbachev when, in 1987, he asked Gorbachev to be allowed to resign from his position as Moscow party boss – on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the October revolution, an event Gorbachev wanted to celebrate with an image of unity. Yeltsin was fiercely attacked at a subsequent central committee meeting and became Gorbachev’s mortal enemy. But the new congress of people’s deputies provided him with a platform. In 1989, campaigning as a populist critic of party privilege and criticising perestroika for failing to improve the economy, he swept to a landslide victory as the Moscow delegate on the congress, and a seat on the Supreme Soviet.
Then, as independence fervour grew in the Baltics, Yeltsin and his supporters saw the potential for developing an alternative power-centre inside Russia itself. They were not the first to seize on what was known as the “Russian idea”. As Gorbachev’s reforms accelerated, party conservatives looked for a way of supplanting him. They pressed for the setting-up of a Russian Communist party, arguing, somewhat bizarrely, that Russians had also suffered inside the union – that the country’s national identity had been submerged into the concept of “Soviet man”.
As resistance to reform grew within the party, Gorbachev decided in March 1990 to create an executive presidency, which would allow him to bypass the party altogether. Some advisers urged him to go for direct elections, but he was afraid. He had himself elected by the Soviet parliament instead. It turned out to be a double mistake. Yeltsin had just been elected to the new Russian parliament. Picked as chairman, in early 1991 he followed Gorbachev’s example and created an executive presidency, this time for Russia alone. But Yeltsin made sure there were direct elections, which he won by a landslide in June. Suddenly, Yeltsin looked a more democratic leader than Gorbachev.
As Yeltsin began to outflank him, Gorbachev reacted indecisively. In September 1990, pressures from the radicals to move towards a market economy grew massively. For a moment, Gorbachev seemed to accept their views, but the prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, persuaded him to resist, even though perestroika had not produced real consumer benefits.
He also appeared indecisive on reforming the Soviet Union. Sections of the army and the KGB were furious with his failure to stop the tide of Baltic independence, and in January 1991 troops mounted a provocative raid on the television tower in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, killing 14 demonstrators. The hardliners, backed by the land forces commander, General Valentin Varennikov, hoped the incident would provoke Gorbachev into declaring a state of emergency and clamping down. The violence shocked the liberals around Gorbachev, although he himself took 10 days to react publicly. He refused to take the tough action the hardliners wanted, but did not denounce them either. It was Yeltsin who took the initiative by rushing to offer support to the Baltic leaders.
When Gorbachev eventually re-emerged, it was clear that Baltic independence could not be halted. He now embarked on a frenzied round of negotiations for a looser Soviet structure in the hope that this would satisfy the growing calls for autonomy. But known as the Novo-Ogaryovo process (from the country house outside Moscow where the talks were held), the talks brought together only nine of the 15 republics. The three Baltic states, plus Armenia, Georgia and Moldova, declined to take part. Within the party, criticism of Gorbachev’s leadership grew from all sides, and at a central committee plenary meeeting in April 1991 he threatened to resign.
The move provoked a crisis. The hardliners had no obvious alternative and the plenum voted to withdraw the issue of his future from the agenda. In his 2011 interview, Gorbachev said he had erred in not resigning from the Communist party and forming a new political party at that time. Had that happened, he argued, he might have saved the union.
Gorbachev left for a holiday in the Crimea, planning to return to Moscow on 20 August to sign the new union treaty his Novo-Ogaryovo process had produced. But the hardliners thought it amounted to the end of the Soviet Union and eight of them, including the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, the defence minister Dmitry Yazov and Varennikov, resolved to arrest him and mount a military coup. A delegation sent to his villa at Foros demanded he cede his powers on the grounds of ill-health. Gorbachev refused, and even threatened to kill himself, as he told a small group of journalists who talked to him in Foros as soon as the coup collapsed.
The plotters claimed Gorbachev was ill, and his place was being taken by the vice-president Gennady Yanayev. They ordered tanks to take up key positions in Moscow. But it was all hopelessly ill-conceived and hastily planned, and, crucially, the plotters failed to arrest Yeltsin, the directly elected Russian president. His defiance split the army, and on the second day of the coup the junta began to fall apart. Gorbachev was soon freed and brought back to Moscow.
When he returned, however, he failed to understand how high Yeltsin’s stock had risen during the coup — and how poorly the party leadership had behaved. No one, for example, had denounced the seizure of power. So when Gorbachev used his first press conference to talk about “renewing” the party, most people felt he was out of touch. Four days later, he came to recognise the new situation, resigning as general secretary and calling on the central committee to disband itself. But, by then, Yeltsin had already issued decrees seizing the Soviet Communist party assets and suspending the newly formed Russian Communist party. The plotters, far from saving the Soviet Union and the Communist parties, had only hastened their demise.
From then on, Gorbachev was doomed. Yeltsin put the KGB and the Soviet foreign ministry under Russian control. In early December, he met the leaders of the other two Slav republics, Ukraine and Belarus, in a hunting lodge near the Polish border. They declared the Soviet Union dead. Three weeks later, on 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president and the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin, signifying the end of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s years in retirement were energetic and dignified. Although Yeltsin stripped him of his limousine and pegged his pension at a figure that hyperinflation reduced to a few pence a month, he never denounced Yeltsin in personal or vindictive terms. He formed the Gorbachev Foundation, funded largely by his book royalties, to conduct research. He made an ill-starred effort to run in the 1996 Russian presidential election, but was shut out of the state television channels and got few votes.
Like other great reformers in history, he ended up in isolation, condemned by some for doing too much and by others for doing too little. For the world beyond Russia, his great service lay in allowing the cold war to come to an end. It did not end as he had hoped – in a grand reconciliation between east and west. Indeed, in retirement he criticised western leaders for expanding Nato to take in several of the former Soviet republics, which he thought was unnecessary and provocative. Inside Russia, his economic reforms failed, though not as catastrophically as those that followed under Yeltsin.
Yeltsin’s circle blamed Gorbachev for the miserable legacy they inherited. Gorbachev, for his part, blamed the legacy of Stalinism for the situation he took over. He will be remembered as the man who consigned the one-party system to oblivion and gave Russians room to breathe. Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin treated Gorbachev with respect despite Gorbachev’s occasional criticisms of the slide back towards authoritarianism.
In 1953 he married Raisa Titarenko; she died in 1999. Their daughter, Irina, survives him.
• Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, politician and statesman, born 2 March 1931; died 30 August 2022
• This article was amended on 31 August 2022. A caption to an earlier image, since removed, incorrectly suggested that Margaret Thatcher was the UK prime minister in 1993.
