Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century British historian, once said, ‘History is but the biography of great men.’

Wrong! Great women also make history. So do other impersonal factors: social movements, economic conditions, international developments, ideas and institutions. But some individual political leaders have a decisive impact on history and their biographies shape the impact they have.

One such leader was Mikhail Gorbachev. He helped to destroy Soviet totalitarianism. More than anyone else he helped to end the Cold War. He sought to reform and preserve the USSR, but he ended up contributing unintentionally to its collapse, leaving him a president without a country.

His great power as a Soviet leader enabled him to transform his country. His uniqueness – the way he differed from other Soviet leaders – suggest that his character and personality are central to understanding what he did with his power.

As leader of a non-democratic regime, he was not constrained by a free press, by powerful interest groups, by constitutional norms, or by the rule of law. If he had acted as other Soviet leaders would have in his place, we might say that he was motivated by values that they all shared, or that he responded as most of them would have to the dictates of the situation they all faced. But Gorbachev was unique. When he took power in March 1985, most of his Kremlin colleagues wanted minimal reforms for their country. But Gorbachev tried to fully democratize it. Toward the end of his time in power, he was supported by only a small minority of the Kremlin leadership: Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s chief ally Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Vadim Medvedev. Moreover, none of these three was a truly independent actor; the only reason they were in a position to support Gorbachev was that he had either appointed them to the Communist party Politburo or kept them on.

The late Russian scholar Dmitry Furman framed Gorbachev’s uniqueness more broadly: he was ‘the only politician in Russian history who, having full power in his hands, voluntarily opted to limit it and even risk losing it, in the name of principled moral values.’ For Gorbachev to have resorted to force and violence to hold onto power would have been ‘a defeat.’ In the light of Gorbachev’s principles, Furman continued, ‘his final defeat was a victory’ – although, one must add, it certainly didn’t feel that way to Gorbachev at the time.

Given his unique impact not only on his country, but on the world, we must try to answer such key questions as: How did Gorbachev, who once wrote a high school essay praising Stalin to the skies, become ‘Gorbachev,’ the grave-digger of the Soviet system? Why did the Soviet regime opt to make such a man its leader? Why did he attempt to democratize the USSR and why did he fail fully to do so? How did Gorbachev, the Soviet Communist leader, and Ronald Reagan, the arch-conservative American president, become almost perfect partners in ending the Cold War? Why did Gorbachev allow the Soviet Union’s East European empire to break away without firing a shot to prevent that?

All these questions have complicated answers involving many of the impersonal forces I mentioned at the start of this essay. But I will focus on his biography.

Born in 1931, Gorbachev grew up in terrible times. Two of his uncles and one aunt starved to death in the terrible famine of 1932-1933. Stalinist purges of the 1930’s swept both his grandfathers into the Gulag, his mother’s father arrested in 1934, his other grandfather in 1937. The Nazis occupied Gorbachev’s rural village for several months in 1942. Famine struck again in 1944 and 1946.

Yet Gorbachev emerged as a remarkably optimistic person, full of self-esteem, extremely confident and trusting in his fellow citizens, all qualities that later shaped his career as a political leader. It took an extremely optimistic and self-confident leader to try to democratize a country that had never known democracy – and a leader who trusted his fellow citizens to govern themselves.

The way his parents (especially his father) and grandparents raised him helped to shape the kind of man he became. His father, Sergei Gorbachev, was apparently a wonderful man, adored by Mikhail and respected by his fellow villagers. According to Gorbachev, he not only had ‘filial feelings’ for his father but was ‘closely attached’ to him. They never put their feelings for each other into words, Gorbachev remembered; ‘they were just there.’ Operating a huge grain harvester, he and his father won a contest with other collective farmers to bring in the biggest harvest. The authorities awarded Sergei Gorbachev the Order of Lenin, but his father asked that it be shared with his son. Mikhail was too young to receive that high honor, but at his father’s suggestion he received the coveted Order of the Red Labor Banner, signed by Joseph Stalin himself.

Mikhail’s maternal grandfather, says Gorbachev, treated him with ‘tenderness,’ not a feeling that Russian men frequently admit to displaying. ‘He was such an interesting person with so much authority,’ Gorbachev recalled. Gorbachev’s mother was much harsher. He told me in an interview that at one point in 1944, when Sergei was away in the war, his mother ‘picked up a belt and raised it, threatening to whip me again. I grabbed it, tore it from her, and said, “That’s it! No more!” She burst into tears – because I was the last object she could control, and now that was gone.’ But Gorbachev’s ‘tough and strong-minded mother’ kept him safe during the war, risking her own life to do so.

Mikhail’s stellar record as a student also buttressed his sense of self-esteem: he excelled not only in his rural school, but as a student leader at the leading institution of higher learning in the land, Moscow State University (MGU), which he entered in 1950. Higher education under late Stalinism was permeated by propaganda and indoctrination. Still, some professors trained before or just after the 1917 revolution introduced students to a wider realm of ideas. Gorbachev and his fellow students ranged even farther beyond ideological orthodoxy. Together with his best friend at MGU, Czech student Zdenek Mlynar (who, believe it or not, turned out to be a key aide to Alexander Dubcek during the Prague Spring of 1968!), Gorbachev watched a classic Stalinist musical comedy. (Yes, such movies not only existed, but were widely popular.) In the film, happy collective farmers joyfully bring in the harvest, while pretty blond milkmaids descend on local stores to buy a piano for their collective farm. ‘It’s not true,’ Gorbachev whispered to Mlynar. ‘If brute force weren’t used against the farmers, they would probably not work at all. And there’s nothing to buy in the stores.’

How did the Soviet regime come to make Gorbachev its leader? After graduating from MGU in 1955, Gorbachev returned to Stavropol, the southern Russian city nearest to Privolnoe, the village where he had grown up. There his successes continued; he rose rapidly through the ranks of the Communist party apparatus, becoming one of the youngest provincial party first secretaries in the Soviet Union in 1970. He earned his promotions by working hard and well, and by hiding his increasingly heretical views, but also (ironically) by seeming to be the ideal product of the Communist system, what was officially called ‘The New Soviet Man.’ Unlike many of his fellow apparatchiki, he was honest, incorruptible and idealistic. Visiting Stavropol to do research on Gorbachev, I asked many who had worked with him there what their first impression of him was. Their answer: ‘He was erudite.’ And almost all of them praised him for the ‘wonderful way he treated his wife.’

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