Biography - Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev was born in 1931 to a peasant family in southern Russia. His father was a tractor driver on a Soviet collective farm. Gorbachev was an excellent student in school and worked on the collective farm. When he was 14, Gorbachev joined the Komsomol (the Communist League of Youth) which allowed him to attend Moscow State University to study law. As a university student, Gorbachev joined the Communist Party.
Gorbachev graduated from Moscow State University and began working for the government of the Soviet Union shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin. This was a period of big changes in the Soviet Union as the country tried to keep up with the United States in the Cold War. As a young communist leader, Gorbachev became friends with Yuri Andropov, the head of the secret police and top Soviet leader, who was from the same region of southern Russia. With Andropov’s support, Gorbachev worked his way up from being working in a regional government, to becoming a city mayor and then the governor of his home region of southern Russia. In 1970, he became a member of the Central Committee that ran the Soviet Union.
In 1978, the leader of the Soviet Union put Gorbachev in charge of running the agricultural administration for the Soviet Union. This was a time when the Soviet economy was having trouble and its farms could not produce enough food to feed the whole Soviet population – it was so bad that the Soviet Union even had to import food from the United States, its enemy in the Cold War. Because of his experience growing up on a collective farm, Gorbachev could see that the problem with the Soviet Union’s farms was that there was no incentive for people to work hard to produce food. Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet Union would have to change to be able to feed its population. However, many of the leaders of the Soviet Union were old and did not want to change anything in the country.
In 1980, Gorbachev’s friend and mentor, Andropov, became the leader of the Soviet Union. Because he had been a leader of the secret police, Andropov knew that the Soviet economy was doing very badly and that the Soviet Union could not keep up with the United States in the Cold War. However, Andropov was old and sick and knew he did not have the time to reform the Soviet Union. Instead, he made Gorbachev a member of the Politburo that ran the Soviet Union. Being in this position allowed Gorbachev to take control of the Soviet Union in 1985, a year after Andropov died.
When Gorbachev came to power and tried to reform the Soviet Union. He tried to improve the economy by giving people freedom to criticize the government (Glasnost) and to start their own businesses (Perestroika). Gorbachev thought that a stronger economy would make the Soviet Union stronger and better able to compete against the United States. However, when given freedom, the people of the Soviet Union made it clear that they were against communism and did not want to live in the Soviet Union. The result was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when the country broke into 15 independent countries, of which Russia is the largest.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev remained an international figure. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in ending the Cold War conflict with the United States. He has been very active in working for charitable foundations and speaking about Russian politics. He attempted to run for president of Russia in the 1990's and got very little support. Most Russians blame Gorbachev for the economic problems the country has faced since the end of the Soviet Union. Curiously, Gorbachev is more popular outside of the former Soviet Union than in the areas he use to rule and he spends a great deal of his time in Western Europe and the United States.