1990 Nobel Prize Winner
Mikhail Gorbachev "This task is an extremely difficult one." |
Biography
|
Profile on Gorbachev The
man credited with helping
end the Cold War was born into a peasant family on March 2, 1931, near
Stavropol. As a boy, he did farm work along with his studies. He joined
the
Communist Party in 1952 and completed a law degree at Moscow University
the
following year. During the early 1960s he became head of the
agriculture
department for the Stavropol region. By the end of the decade he had
risen to
top of the party hierarchy in the region. He came to the attention of
Politburo
members Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, who got him elected to the
Central
Committee in 1971 and arranged foreign trips for their rising star. In
1978 he
was back in Moscow, and the next year he was chosen as a candidate
member of
the Politburo. His stewardship of Soviet agriculture was not a success.
As he
came to realize, the collective system was fundamentally flawed in more
than
one way. A
full Politburo member since
1980, Gorbachev became more influential in 1982 when his mentor,
Andropov,
succeeded Leonid Brezhnev. He built a reputation as an enemy of
corruption and
inefficiency. Gorbachev finally rose to the top party spot in March
1985.
Almost from the start, he strove for significant reforms, so that the
system
would work more efficiently and more democratically. Hence the two key
phrases
of the Gorbachev era: "glasnost" (openness) and
"perestroika" (reform). Hoping to shift resources to the civilian
sector of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev also began to argue in favor of
an end
to the arms race with the West. Throughout
his six years in
office, Gorbachev always seemed to be moving too fast for the party
establishment, which saw its privileges threatened, and too slow for
more
radical reformers, who hoped to do away with the one-party state and
the
command economy. Desperately trying to stay in control of the reform
process,
he seemed to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis. He
also
seemed to have had a blind spot for the power of the nationality issue:
Glasnost created ever-louder calls for independence from the Baltics
and other
Soviet republics. He was successful in foreign policy, but primarily
from an
international perspective. While his arms control agreements with the
United
States could be seen as in the Soviet interest too, the peaceful
breakaway of
the countries of Eastern Europe, followed by German unification and
NATO
membership for the new Germany, appeared to old-line Communists more a
sell-out. In August 1991 hard-liners
had had enough. With Gorbachev on vacation in the Crimea, they staged a
coup.
However, they failed because of incompetence, lack of support from the
military
and massive street protests in Moscow. After the coup, Gorbachev lost
the
political initiative. This now belonged to the leaders of the various
Soviet
republics, in particular the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. At the
end of
the year, Gorbachev was forced to resign as president of a Soviet Union
no
longer in existence. Since that time, he has been blamed by many
Russians for
their current political and economic predicament. In the West, he
remains the
1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped end the Cold War. |