Gorbachev, A Life: The Berlin Wall fell and millions in the Soviet communist sphere got their first real taste of freedom. But he was unable to control the forces he unleashed and ultimately waged a losing battle to salvage a crumbling empire.
But a mere year later, he was the sad and bewildered embodiment of failure. The country had fallen apart in his hands, and at home he was derided, despised and increasingly shunted aside as irrelevant.
“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 Associated Press in a 1992 interview shortly after he left office. Soon after taking power, he 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 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 grew.
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