Former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev died on Tuesday, Russian news agencies said, citing public health officials.
Born in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, into a poor peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian descent, as a young man Gorbachev was a harvester operator on a collective farm where he was part of the Communist Party of the USSR (CPSU). He later graduated as a lawyer from Moscow State University. He later worked for the Komsomol youth organization and after Stalin’s death he became an advocate for de-Stalinization. In 1970 he was appointed first party secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee. In 1978 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and in 1979 he was part of the Political Bureau. Three years after the death of Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982), after the brief mandates of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, he was elected general secretary of the CPSU.
Upon taking office, aged just 54, he set out to revive the Soviet economy, stagnant after years adrift under Brezhnev. To this end, he called for rapid technological modernization, higher worker productivity, and tried to make the Soviet bureaucracy more efficient.
Between 1987 and 1988 he initiated deeper reforms. Under his policy of glasnost (“openness”), the freedoms of expression and information were significantly expanded in the USSR. Under the perestroika (“restructuring”) the first attempts to democratize the Soviet system were undertaken. As a result, in some elections to partisan and government positions, multiple candidates and the secret ballot were introduced. Market mechanisms were also approved in the economy, which, however, ended up encountering strong resistance between the bureaucrats of the party and the government.
In foreign policy, in December 1987 Gorbachev signed an agreement with President Ronald Reagan against intermediate-range nuclear weapons. And in 1988-1989 he authorized the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Throughout 1989 he took every opportunity to express his support for the reformists in Eastern European countries, and when they collapsed Gorbachev accepted his downfall and did not intervene with troops.
In March 1990 the Congress of People’s Deputies elected him to the newly created position of President of the USSR, with broad executive powers. But his attempts to increase his presidential powers through decrees and administrative reorganizations were unsuccessful; the authority and effectiveness of his government then began to decline. Faced with the collapse of the economy, growing social frustration, and the continuing shift of power to the republics, in late 1990 Gorbachev allied himself with party conservatives and security organs.
Gorbachev and his family were under house arrest from August 19 to 21, 1991, during a brief coup led by supporters of the so-called hardliners. After the coup failed, he resumed his functions as president, but his position had already weakened. Entering into an inevitable alliance with Boris Yeltsin, the new political card, Gorbachev resigned from the Communist Party, dissolved the Central Committee and supported measures to strip the party of its control over the security organs and the armed forces.
On December 25, 1991, he resigned from the presidency of the USSR, whose dissolution altered world dynamics with effects that continue to this day.
In 1996, he ran for president of Russia, but received less than 1% of the vote. Nevertheless, he remained active in public life as a speaker and as a member of various think tanks global and local.
In 1989 he visited Cuba. “We have seen sad things in other socialist countries, very sad things,” Fidel Castro had said in reference to the reforms in the USSR and Eastern Europe. And during the visit, the Cuban leader declared that a process like the perestroika it was not possible in a country located 150 km from the coast of the United States. “Cuba is more threatened by capitalism than the other socialist countries,” he said.
Gorbachev died in Moscow at the age of 91.
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