Mikhail S. Gorbachev, reformist Soviet leader, dead at 91

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, altering the world’s political climate .

At home, he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power, he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.

For this, he was hounded from office by hard-line communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not. It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, a distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.

But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For Putin – and his fellow KGB veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia – the end of the USSR was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo.

“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, although his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” A friend of his, radio journalist Alexei Venediktov, said in a July interview that Gorbachev was “upset” about the war, viewing it as having undermined “his life’s work.”

When he came to power, Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.

A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves – empty of just about everything but vodka.

The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.

The problems were clear; the solutions less so. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.

It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.

The openness Gorbachev sought – what came to be known as glasnost – and his policy of perestroika aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened communist bureaucracy to attack him.

Still, Gorbachev’s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:

• He presided over an arms agreement with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.
• He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.
• While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.
• He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform that in many places drove stunned communist leaders out of office.
• He oversaw an attack on corruption in the upper reaches of the Communist Party, a purge that removed hundreds of bureaucrats from their posts.
• He permitted the release of dissident Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
• He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.
• In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom of conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to “satisfy their spiritual needs.”

But if Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world – he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 – he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.

After five years of Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.

Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: “We see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.”

A Son of Peasants

There was little in his early life that would have led anyone to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev could become such a dynamic leader. His official biography, issued after he became the new party chief, traced the well-traveled path of a good, loyal communist.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, a farming village in the Stavropol region of the Caucasus. His parents were genuine peasants, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. During his infancy, the forced collectivization of the land turned a once-fertile region into “a famine disaster area,” exiled writer and biologist Zhores A. Medvedev wrote in a biography of Gorbachev.

In 1950, at 19, he left home to attend Moscow State University, a journey of more than 850 miles that took him through an impoverished countryside, devastated first by collectivization and then by the German invasion in World War II. At the end of the trip was the Stromynka, a vast, austere and crowded dormitory – eight to 15 students to a room – that had been a military barracks in the time of Peter the Great.

Once he became a law student, Gorbachev was permitted to read books, forbidden to other students, on the history of political ideas. He became familiar with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel and Rousseau. (Years later, during the meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies that installed him as an American-style president, delegates were seen carrying around copies of the Constitution of the United States and asking American observers about “checks and balances.”)

One evening his friends dragged him away from his books to a ballroom dancing class, where he found himself waltzing with a lively and attractive philosophy student named Raisa Maximovna Titarenko. They began dating. More sophisticated than he was, Raisa took the earnest and still provincial Mikhail to concerts and museums, filling in the gaps in his cultural education. They were married in 1953.

Impressed by Khrushchev

A formative influence on the young Gorbachev was the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had exposed the reign of terror of the Stalin era – the purges, mass arrests and labor camps – and changed the complexion of Soviet politics, making a deep impression on Gorbachev.

So had Khrushchev’s campaign against corruption, party privilege and bureaucratic inefficiency. Gorbachev and others of his generation came to call themselves “the children of the 20th Congress.”

Unlike most party functionaries, Gorbachev made it a practice to spend time with workers. But even more important to his future, his position as Stavropol party chief enabled him to rub shoulders with the party’s elite, who came to the region for its spas, some of them reserved almost exclusively for members of the Politburo, the party’s ruling body.

It was Gorbachev’s task as the local party leader to greet the dignitaries at the train, take them to their dachas, entertain them and escort them back to the railroad station for their return to Moscow. One ailing leader followed another: Premier Alexei Kosygin with a heart condition; Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB and briefly premier, with a chronic kidney problem; Mikhail Suslov, the party ideologist, who latched on to Gorbachev as a young counterweight to the aging clique surrounding the supreme leader, Leonid Brezhnev.

Suslov and Andropov became powerful patrons of Gorbachev, as did Fyodor Kulakov, who was installed in the Politburo in 1971 and put in charge of agriculture. When Kulakov, who was seen as a possible successor to Brezhnev, died in 1978, Gorbachev was chosen to deliver the funeral oration. It was his first speech in Red Square, and the first time television viewers saw the man with the distinctive strawberry birthmark on his forehead.

Returning to Stavropol, Gorbachev was on hand to welcome Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko, a high-ranking Politburo member. Andropov, who was resting at a nearby spa, also came to greet them. It was a remarkable moment in Soviet history. As a Time magazine biography noted, “There on the narrow platform stood four men who would rule the Soviet Union in succession: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev.”

The meeting was apparently enough to convince Brezhnev that Gorbachev was the man to take over the agriculture portfolio for the Central Committee. His opinion may have been fortified by Gorbachev’s admiring critique of Brezhnev’s recently ghostwritten memoir, “Little Land.” In his book “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire,” David Remnick quoted Gorbachev as writing, “Communists and all the workers of Stavropol express limitless gratitude to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for this literary work of deep philosophical penetration.”

Gorbachev experienced a sense of the country’s economic stagnation and corruption during the Brezhnev years, but it was not until he moved into powerful posts under Andropov and Chernenko that he saw how crippling the problems were. As a Central Committee secretary, he arranged for a crash course on the economic crisis and organized seminars specifically on rescuing the agricultural sector.

Already he was demonstrating a flexibility rare for Soviet leaders. Quoting Lenin in a speech, he said the country’s main task was “to mobilize a maximum of initiative and to display a maximum of independence.” The word perestroika, a restructuring, was taking shape in his mind.

In 1984 he traveled to Britain, where he impressed Britons with his knowledge of their literature. Visiting the British Museum, where Karl Marx did much of his research, he remarked, “If people don’t like Marx, they should blame the British Museum.”

But when a British lawmaker brought up the issue of persecution of religious groups in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s good humor evaporated. “You govern your society,” he snapped, “you leave us to govern ours.”

Still, the British were taken with Gorbachev and his fashionable wife, who was seen using an American Express gold card to shop at Harrods. “I like Mr. Gorbachev,” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in 1984. “We can do business together.” She later encouraged President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev to do business together as well.

‘Nice Smile, Iron Teeth’

With the death of Chernenko on March 10, 1985, Gorbachev, who had been substituting for the ailing leader, moved to disarm the opposition and take power. At a hastily called Politburo meeting, Andrei Gromyko, the longtime foreign minister, argued the case for Gorbachev. “Comrades,” he said in a speech, “this man has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth.”

Perestroika and glasnost (openness) became the watchwords of the Gorbachev era. He would let people see him in person when he visited hospitals, factories and schools, and would ask where they thought things had gone wrong.

There would be no Potemkin villages: He would announce that he was visiting one hospital and turn up at another, where there would have been no time to put up a false front. What he saw and heard embarrassed the Moscow party boss, and Gorbachev had him pensioned off, installing in his place Boris Yeltsin in 1985 and opening a half-decade of rivalry and cooperation between the two men.

Within seven months Gorbachev had replaced most of the Politburo’s old guard. The following year he replaced 41% of the voting members of the 27th Party Congress and pushed top military officers and thousands of bureaucrats into retirement.

Even Gromyko, the party stalwart who had nominated him, was removed as foreign minister after 28 years and booted upstairs to the largely ceremonial post of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, or president. He was replaced by Shevardnadze, then a relatively unknown and reform-minded party secretary from Georgia.

Upending the Party System

As a loyal communist, Gorbachev had intended to work through the party to rehabilitate Soviet society. But it became apparent to him that tinkering would never be enough to repair what was broken. The changes would have to be as broad as the problems were deep. He came to see that communism could no longer be the ruling force in Soviet life.

Arrayed against him at home were some 18 million party and state officials whose survival depended on the status quo. He consequently followed a zigzag course between change and orthodoxy, taking a few steps forward, then a few steps back, responding to popular demand while trying to placate the party faithful. He called for a revival of Marxism while seeking to dismantle the political structure that had upheld the communists’ rule.

The party’s monopoly on power would be replaced with a multiparty system. Gorbachev enlarged, and weakened, the Politburo, and eliminated the office of general secretary, the very perch from which Soviet leaders had controlled the country since the days of Stalin, replacing it with an elected president – himself – supported by a presidential council of advisers.

The plan that he and his advisers initially came up with was a form of shock therapy, a “500 Days” program that would accommodate private enterprise, remove subsidies, institute market-driven pricing and create a currency of value.

Gorbachev soon found himself caught between the pincers of established glasnost and delayed perestroika. The promised changes in the economy were delayed, but the people were free to complain vigorously about the gap between promise and performance. Public disaffection grew so intense that it spilled over into the May Day parade of 1990, when protesters marched through Red Square, hooting and jeering at their leaders standing atop the Lenin Mausoleum. “Gorbachev, the people don’t trust you – resign,” read one placard. On another: “Food is not a luxury.”

Gorbachev ultimately backed down from institutionalizing his plan, fearing the trauma and dislocation it would cause. A close associate, Alexander Yakovlev, was quoted by The Washington Post as lamenting that Gorbachev had rejected “the last chance for a civilized transition to a new order.”

“It was probably his worst, most dangerous mistake,” he said.

To begin containing military expenses, Gorbachev ended the military debacle in Afghanistan, which had become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. The intervention, which had begun in December 1979, had been intended to support Afghanistan’s Marxist-Leninist government against Indigenous opposition, the Afghan mujahedeen and foreign volunteers, many of them Arabs. But it dragged on for nine years and cost 15,000 Soviet lives before the last Soviet forces were pulled out, in 1989.

The retreat dramatized Gorbachev’s break with the muscle-flexing foreign policy of the Brezhnev period. Eight months later, on Oct. 23, 1989, Shevardnadze, the foreign minister, told the Soviet legislature that the Afghanistan expedition had violated Soviet law and international norms of behavior. The invasion, he said, “with such serious consequences for our country, was taken behind the backs of the party and the people.”

In the same speech, again breaking with the Brezhnev past, Shevardnadze acknowledged that the construction of an early-warning radar station near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia had, as Washington long contended, violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the United States.

At the time, the United States was moving toward a space-based anti-missile system, which its critics said also violated the treaty. Gorbachev was positioning himself for new arms agreements.

In pursuit of that goal, he began meeting with Reagan, first in Geneva in 1985, then in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, and again in Washington in 1987, to sign a landmark agreement that for the first time eliminated an entire class of weapons – medium- and shorter-range weapons in Europe – while calling for on-site inspections to verify the cutbacks.

In May 1988, Reagan became the first American president to visit Moscow in 14 years. Afterward, he declared: “Quite possibly we are beginning to take down the barriers of the postwar era. Quite possibly we are entering a new era in history – a time of lasting change in the Soviet Union.”

Reagan, who in 1987 had challenged Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, was for all intents and purposes declaring an end to the Cold War.

Reagan’s successor, George Bush, met with Gorbachev in December 1989 for a gale-swept summit meeting held on Soviet and American naval ships off Malta. The meeting was meant to bury the Cold War once and for all and solidify a new relationship between the superpowers.

But the “the ultimate test” of his leadership, Gorbachev acknowledged to Bush, was still the economy. Following the Malta summit talks, to buoy the Soviet leader, Bush took steps toward a trade agreement that would grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation status, lowering American tariffs on Soviet goods and giving it easier access to the American market, which in turn would help the country modernize.

Passing of an Empire

Gorbachev’s perestroika was graphically demonstrated when, in a stunning chapter of history, Eastern Europe’s communist regimes fell, one after another.

In a few euphoric months in 1989, the political architecture of Europe was transformed by popular demand for democracy. Seven countries that had been locked behind the Iron Curtain for more than four decades once again tasted independence. Some historians have ranked 1989 alongside 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution, and 1848, a year of political upheaval throughout Europe, in importance.

There is little question that Gorbachev was the catalyst of that change. Whatever was to happen within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev would be remembered as the man who restored Europe to what it was before World War II, a continent of independent national states.

On Nov. 9, the Berlin Wall came down and waves of Germans swarmed westward.

Except for Albania, every totalitarian communist regime in Europe had fallen before the new year and the new decade.

With memories of World War II still fresh, Moscow had strong doubts that a reunited and resurgent Germany was something to be desired. Though many Warsaw Pact countries were content to see a reunited Germany within NATO, the Soviet Union rejected that proposal, suggesting instead that Germany be a member of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. That idea was rejected by the United States.

Negotiations on German unification were held in what became known as the “two plus four” talks, including the foreign ministers of the two Germanys and the victorious World War II powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain.

Gorbachev sought a “synchronization” of two issues, German unity and European security. Finally, on July 16, 1990, an agreement was reached placing a unified Germany within NATO. Gorbachev declared, “We are leaving one epoch in international relations and entering another, a period, I think, of strong, prolonged peace.”

Hard-Liners at His Door

On Sunday, Aug. 18, 1991, Gorbachev was on vacation in Foros, a Black Sea resort area on the Crimean Peninsula. He was putting the finishing touches on a major speech about a new union treaty that would transfer considerable power from the Kremlin to the nation’s 15 republics, which were to begin signing the document Tuesday. Then, without warning, a delegation of Kremlin hard-liners from the military and the KGB arrived at the door of his dacha, having cut off his phones. They demanded that he declare a state of emergency and resign.

What unfolded was a chain of events that some called the three days that shook the world. At 6 a.m. Monday, the official news agency Tass announced that Gorbachev had been ousted, citing his “inability for health reasons” to perform his duties. Vice President Gennadi Yanayev took power under a new entity, the State Emergency Committee.

An hour later, an emergency decree was announced suspending political parties and closing the opposition press. Gorbachev’s whereabouts was unknown. Boris Yeltsin, president of what was now called the Russian federated republic, called the takeover a coup d’état.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin had often been at odds, but now Yeltsin had become his most important – and most visible – ally. By 11 a.m. Soviet troops and tanks had surrounded the government building known as the White House and by early afternoon hundreds of demonstrators had surrounded the tanks.

Yeltsin joined them. Climbing atop a T-72 tank, megaphone in hand, he called for a general strike. Alongside him was Gen. Konstantin Kobets, defense minister of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, who ordered the armed forces to stand down. “Not a hand will be raised against the people or the duly elected president of Russia,” Kobets said.

The turmoil soon spread to the capitals of other republics. The next day Yeltsin demanded to see Gorbachev and insisted that foreign doctors examine him, and crowds outside the Russian Parliament grew to 150,000.

On Wednesday, with the tide turning against the hard-liners, Soviet troops withdrew from the center of Moscow, and the coup leaders fled. On Thursday, Gorbachev returned to Moscow to reassert control.

The coup had unraveled, but the political blow to Gorbachev was critical. Yeltsin had replaced him as the symbol of democracy in Russia. On Aug. 24, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved its Central Committee. On Dec. 25, the formal end of the Soviet empire was sealed when he resigned as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Raisa Gorbachev, who suffered a stroke during the coup, died of leukemia in 1999, and Gorbachev started spending more time abroad giving speeches and traveling the international diplomatic circuit.

Gorbachev remained popular in the West (he was even selected for an advertising campaign for Louis Vuitton in 2007), but in Russia his kind of thinking became obsolete as the corruption he had fought against reached new heights, with billions flowing into the hands of oligarchs and then out of the country.

By 2009, Anatoly B. Chubais, an economist-turned-politician who personally benefited richly from the privatization, said that “Gorbachev is the most hated man in Russia.”

Information about Gorbachev’s survivors was not immediately available. The Russian state media said he would be buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow near his wife. They did not specify a date.

Despite the difficulties he faced, Gorbachev succeeded in permanently upending the political, economic and social character of what was once the Soviet Union, as well as the entire map of Eastern Europe. But he, more than anyone, knew how far he had fallen short.

In an interview during his final days in office, he told The New York Times, “For all the mistakes, miscalculations – or, on the contrary, for all the great leaps – we accomplished the main preparatory political and human work.”

“In this sense,” he added, “it will never be possible to turn society back.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.