Gorbachev Dies: Man Who Ended the Soviet Union

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985 intending to save the Soviet Union, not end it. At 54, he was the youngest member of the Politburo and the first Soviet leader born after the Revolution. He inherited an economy in stagnation, an arms race draining the treasury, and an invasion of Afghanistan entering its sixth year with no prospect of victory. His twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were designed to modernize the system he believed in. Glasnost meant allowing public criticism of government failures, in the press and in civic life, without the state security apparatus crushing it. Perestroika meant economic reform: introducing limited market mechanisms, reducing central planning, and encouraging private enterprise within a socialist framework. The reforms unleashed forces he could not control. Glasnost allowed citizens to discuss the system's failures openly for the first time. They had a lot to discuss. Perestroika disrupted the command economy without replacing it with functioning markets, creating shortages and confusion. Nationalist movements in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, and other republics used the new freedoms to demand independence. He watched the Berlin Wall fall on November 9, 1989, and chose not to use Soviet troops to stop it, a decision that made him a hero in the West and a villain to Soviet hardliners. He watched the republics break away one by one. A failed coup attempt by Communist hardliners in August 1991 temporarily restored him to power but fatally weakened the central government. Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian republic, emerged as the dominant political figure. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of a country that had ceased to exist three days earlier. He handed the nuclear launch codes to Yeltsin. The Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin for the last time. He spent his post-Soviet years running the Gorbachev Foundation, giving lectures, and appearing in a Pizza Hut commercial. Russians mostly blamed him for the collapse. He died on August 30, 2022, at 91, in a Moscow hospital.