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By: Nir 15 / 11 / 1998 Gorbachev Mikail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born in 1931 in a small farming village called Privolnoye, which was in the Stavropol region of Russia. Gorbachev had a hard youth. His family lived under Stalin s terror and were forced into collective labour farms. He was able to survive through those days because his grandfather helped organise a collective farm, this meant that he was on Stalin s side.
Later, came the Nazi invasion were Gorbachev was only 11 years old when the German tanks came nearby Stavropol, his father had to fight during four years, and five years later when Gorbachev went to Moscow he saw that everything laid in ruins. Seeing the USSR in this way, could ve been why he became president, to make the USSR prosper. Then like all Russian politics we have studied, he went to the Moscow State University were he studied law, though he was more interested in politics. During his studies he fell in love with a student and they married in 1954. He joined the communist party in 1952 and steadily rose in the regional party. He became first secretary of the Stavropol territory in 1970.
He was very open to the journalists and farmers, and was said to be an incorruptible bureaucrat. In 1978 he met the party boss, Lenoid Brezhnev, he was later called to come to Moscow to become member of the national hierarchy and at this time was the 20 th ranking among all the Soviet leaders. The Kremlin was looking for someone to continue the labour, because most of the members were old. In 1982 Brezhnev died and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev became Yuri s second-in-command.
After Gorbachev died in 1984, Gorbachev became the second most powerful man, behind Cherneko. When Cherneko died in 1985, Gorbachev succeeded him and became General Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1988, Gromyko retired as president of the USSR and Gorbachev assumed this title. Gorbachev was the youngest man to hold supreme power in the USSR after Stalin. Between 1985 - 1990 Gorbachev sought to reform Soviet society by introducing perestroika and glasnost.
In international affairs he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Normalised the relations with a neighbouring China, signed a series of arms control agreements with the U. S presidents, Reagan and Bush, and helped the US in the Gulf War. For helping to end the Cold War and allowing former soviet countries in Eastern Europe, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1990. In Russian glasnost means openness.
This openness was for the people; it freed the newspapers and the people to discuss Soviet social problems honestly for the first time in the Soviet history. Perestroika meant the restructuring of the economy, which was more difficult to achieve Gorbachev thought that one could solve Soviet economic problems by hard work, introducing a light capitalism and cutting the vodka consumption. However, the real problems were so deep that there were no simple solutions. After couple of years of fruitless efforts he has discovered that one needed more radical solutions. Glasnost as well, was kind of a problem. While living in a totalitarian, closed society, the Russian people believed that their country provided a very good life, education, and high technological standards and was a superpower in military terms.
When openness was announced the Russian people started to learn about life in different countries, like Western Europe, US, Japan and suddenly they discovered that theirs was a Third World Country with nuclear weapons. They have realised how poor they were, and have completely lost their national pride. The Soviet Republics like Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic States have asked for independence. The end of the Soviet Union was approaching. Glasnost also opened a way for the critics. While Gorbachev was away in Crimea, during his summer vacations, a bunch of hard-line communists decided to perform a coup.
They have detained Gorbachev in his summerhouse near Feodosya and ordered tanks into the streets of Moscow. But the coup was performed in a sloppy way, and the group who performed the coup, did not look convinced even themselves when transmitted their advertisement on the media. The people went out to the streets to protect the Russian elected parliament against the tanks sent by the coup, and Boris Yeltsin, a populist charismatic leader, used this opportunity climbing the tank, speaking against the illegal coup, and confronting the tanks. Since this moment he became a hero, the soldiers refused to fire against him and the plotters fled.
Although Gorbachev was brought back to Moscow from his holiday home, he looked a broken man and it was clear that he would leave the power to Boris Yeltsin. After leaving the leadership of the Soviet Union, Mikail Gorbachev dedicated his time to lecture and travelling all over the world to explain his ideas and his vision for the future for Russia. He tried to compete in the past presidential elections, but failed to attract a significant support. It looks like that the Russian people will never forgive him for taking their pride away, dismantling the Soviet Empire, and bringing them back from the beautiful dream of communism to real life.
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