Who was Mikhail Gorbachev?
was a former Soviet politician from Russia. From 1985 to 1991, he was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union’s eighth and final leader. He was also the country’s head of state from 1988 to 1991, serving as chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s Presidium from 1988 to 1989, Supreme Soviet chairman from 1989 to 1990, and Soviet Union president from 1990 to 1991. Gorbachev initially supported Marxism-Leninism, but by the early 1990s, he had shifted to social democracy.
Gorbachev was born to a poor peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian ancestry in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai. Growing up under Joseph Stalin’s rule, he worked on a collective farm with combine harvesters before joining the Communist Party, which then ruled the Soviet Union as a one-party state based on the prevailing interpretation of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. He married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953, prior to receiving his law degree in 1955, while studying at Moscow State University. Moving to Stavropol, he joined the Komsomol youth organisation and, after Stalin’s death, became a vocal supporter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization reforms.
In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, where he oversaw the construction of the Great Stavropol Canal. In 1978, he returned to Moscow to become Secretary of the party’s Central Committee, and in 1979, he was elected to the party’s ruling Politburo. Following the brief regimes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as General Secretary, the de facto head of government, in 1985, three years after the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Quotes by Mikhail Gorbachev
“If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.”
“I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature.”
“I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos.”
“We have retreated from the perennial values. I don’t think that we need any new values. The most important thing is to try to revive the universally known values from which we have retreated.
As a young man, I really took to heart the Communist ideals. A young soul certainly cannot reject things like justice and equality. These were the goals proclaimed by the Communists. But in reality that terrible Communist experiment brought about the repression of human dignity. Violence was used in order to impose that model on society. In the name of Communism, we abandoned basic human values. So when I came to power in Russia I started to restore those values; values of “openness” and freedom.”
“One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.”
“Americans have a severe disease — worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex.”
