Gorbachev

 

by Pa Rock

History Major

One of the most significant individuals of the twentieth century has left the stage of world affairs.  Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Premier of the Soviet Union, passed away yesterday in Moscow.    He was ninety-one.

Mikhail Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, a recognition that was well deserved.

Born into a peasant family, Gorbachev drove a tractor on a farm collective in his youth, was diligent and hard-working, and in due course was awarded membership in the Communist Party.  He attended and graduated law school, and at the young age of forty was appointed to the Communist Party Central Committee.  Gorbachev eventually rose to the rank of General Secretary of the Communist Party and became the Premier of the Soviet Union in 1985, a position that he held until 1991 when the Soviet Union was officially dissolved.

Gorbachev is credited with being the individual who precipitated the end of the Cold War.  When he took over leadership of the Soviet Union it was becoming bogged down in a war in Afghanistan that had been going on for over six years.  The Soviet people were growing war-weary, and the economy was generally stagnating.  Gorbachev sought to bring some democratic reforms to the largely totalitarian country, and during his first year in power he instituted a policy called "glasnost" which called for a more open government, one that sought input from the people it served, and a more widespread dissemination of information.

But Gorbachev did not stop with political reforms.  He also addressed economic concerns and reforms with a policy called "perestroika" that basically ended the old Soviet system of central planning and allowed for more autonomy in production.  Soviet manufacturing began focusing on what world markets were doing and what consumers were actually seeking.

As Gorbachev's reforms started taking hold, independence movements that were inspired by the new freedoms began springing up within the Soviet Union and throughout much of its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.  When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989 with no interference from Moscow, it signaled to the rest of the world that Soviet dominance in that region was coming to an end.  The Warsaw Pact (Eastern European nations militarily aligned with the Soviet Union) began collapsing in early 1991 - after the Soviet's failed attempt to stop an independence movement in Lithuania - and the pact was dissolved by July of that year.   

The constituent republics of the Soviet Union gained full independence on December 26, 1991, and the Soviet Union was at an end, a process that was both initiated (though inadvertently) and overseen (reluctantly) by Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika).

Ironically, when Mikhail Gorbachev died, over thirty years after the official demise of the Soviet Union,  the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, was hard at work trying to get the band back together.