The last Soviet leader started out driving combine harvesters with his father
As a teenager, Mikhail Gorbachev spent five summers helping his father run a combine harvester, sometimes for 20 hours a day, and won a labour medal before he was 20. That peasant background got him into Moscow's top university without an exam. Four decades later he presided over the end of the Soviet Union.
His birthplace, on 2 March 1931, was Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus split between Russians and Ukrainians, and was secretly baptised at his mother's insistence. Stalin's era marked the family deeply. Two uncles and an aunt died in the famine of the early 1930s, and both his grandfathers were sent to labour camps; one later described being tortured by the secret police, which left a lasting impression on the boy. German troops occupied the village for months in 1942, while his father fought at Kursk after being wrongly reported dead. In 1948 father and son brought in more than 800 tonnes of grain, earning the father the Order of Lenin and Mikhail the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
He studied law at Moscow State University, an unusual choice in a country that did not value lawyers. Classmates remembered a hard worker and a mediator who privately objected to the Soviet rule that a confession proved guilt, since confessions could be coerced. He publicly defended a Jewish student during an antisemitic campaign, befriended Zdeněk Mlynář, later a leading thinker of the Prague Spring, and married a philosophy student, Raisa Titarenko, in 1953. After graduating in 1955 he built a career in Stavropol, backing Khrushchev's break with Stalinism, and rose to run the regional party in 1970 before joining the Central Committee in Moscow in 1978.
The Politburo chose him as general secretary in 1985 after two elderly leaders died in quick succession. Convinced the system needed reform to survive, he pulled troops out of Afghanistan and held summits with Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons. At home, glasnost, or openness, loosened censorship, perestroika tried to decentralise the economy, and an elected Congress of People's Deputies began to erode one-party rule. When Warsaw Pact states abandoned communism in 1989, he did not send in troops.
Rising nationalism in the republics prompted hardliners to attempt a coup in August 1991. It failed, but the Soviet Union dissolved later that year against his wishes. He went on to criticise both Yeltsin and Putin and died on 30 August 2022. A Nobel Peace laureate praised for ending the Cold War, he is blamed by critics for Russia's lost influence and economic collapse.
Source: Mikhail Gorbachev
