Heroes are everywhere, some are seen and some are hidden in the shadows. Mikhail Gorbachev was what seemed like an unlikely hero. He was born to a poor family in a farming village in Russia. He eventually worked his way up the political ladder in Russia. He ended many conflicts around the world with his neutrality and did the best he could for his country. Mikhail Gorbachev is a famous person who did important work, helped others, and has had a lasting influence in the world of being the person who diminished communism in Russia and made a treaty with the United States to eliminate intermediate range nuclear missiles.
Mikhail was born to Maria Gorbachev and Sergei Gorbachev in the village of Privolnoye, March 2, 1931. With all farms owned by the government, Gorbachev's father went to work as a combine-harvester driver. His father was drafted to fight in World War II when the Nazis broke the treaty with Russia and invaded the country. His father survived the war and came back to his family. Young Mikhail was an exceptional student and at the age of fourteen he joined the Komsomol (The...
A hero is a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievement, or noble qualities. John Jay was a hero because he was one the nation’s Founding Fathers. He helped bring independence to the colonies along with creating a constitution
After the assassination of Alexander the Great in 1881 by Russian socialist revolutionaries, Alexander III ascended to the throne and began to develop a reactionary policy that would be used to suppress the power of anti-tsarist rivals (Kort 23). In the late 1800s, Tsar Alexander III was faced with growing insurrection from the populist peasants, who were demanding more freedoms and land under the Tsarist regime. However, he was unwilling to give up his traditional centralized authority for a more democratic system of ruling. Instead, he sought political guidance from his advisor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an Orthodox religious conservative and loyal member of the Russian autocracy. Pobedonostsev was quick to hound revolutionaries by means
Anyone can truly be a hero, even in real life. Heroes can be people who simply have an idea and decide to grow onto that idea and have it done. For example, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were real life heroes who started out as ordinary people but had a dream and made a huge difference in the end. Nelson Mandela, a Civil Rights activists, once said, “We can change the world and make it a better place. It is in your hands to make a difference” (Lazaro). Nelson Mandela was trying to say that anybody can make a difference, but it is up to that person or people to make that change. One simple change could cause any simple person to have a major change in lifestyle just because they decided to step up and do something. Furthermore, anyone can be a hero, it doesn’t matter what one’s background is, one can make even the simplest of changes and become a hero to oneself and the people around them.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was first secretary of the Soviet Communist party from 1953 to 1964 and effective leader of the USSR from 1956 (premier from 1958) to 1964. He was born on April 17th, 1894, in the village of Kalinovka, Kursk province. As a young boy, Khrushchev worked long hours in the coal mines. Khrushchev seemed to be a revolutionist from a young age as he organized several strikes and in 1918 he joined the Bolshevik party and fought in the Civil War. Afterward, he was sent by the party to a technical institute to learn more about Marxism.
According to google.com a hero is someone who “is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievments, or noble equalities.” (google.com). For example, superman , superman is an all time american classic modern hero who is admired for his courage and for saving earth multiple times from super villains. Another example of a hero is Beowulf. Beowulf was created around 1000 AD and was known far and wide throughout the lands for his selflessness,bravery, and courage .
Ronald Reagan was a true hero to many people. He showed strength when the country, and the world needed a strong person. When there were challenges he rose to the occasion, and conquered them. He was an honest man with a big heart that had a love for country, and all of the people in it. Overall most people have nothing but respect for his legacy, even most of his critics give him respect for some of his accomplishments. This is why Ronald Reagan was a hero to many, and his legacy still lives on today.
It takes a lot to be called a hero. Robert F. Kennedy once said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or the lot of others. Or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.” A hero is someone that will always be remembered for something good that they did. There are numerous reasons as to why one can say Harry Truman is a hero. His commitment and strength began earlier in his life when he decided to serve his country by joining the army during the World War (Miller 132).
Joseph Stalin was the son of a poor shoemaker from a backward province with a significantly minimum amount of education. Stalin had always had a place for faith in the destiny of the Russian social revolution and an incredible amount of determination to play a role in it. Stalin’s rise to power was remarkable and deadly, yet in an unexplainable twenty-nine years of leadership he turned Russia into a highly industrialized nation. Stalin was a tyrannical ruler who played the most significant role in shaping the direct of Europe at the end of World War II in 1945. He went from a young revolutionist to an absolute leader of Soviet Russia. His involvement with domestic and foreign policies cast his shadow upon the world at the end of World War II with his radical ideals. The policy of socialism, the Five Year Plans, and the collectivization of Agriculture were all of Stalin’s key methods of casting this impactful shadow on the world.
Vladimir Putin first gained power in the year 1999 when Russian President Boris Yeltsin named him Prime Minister. Putin was then elected President of Russia in the year 2000, only to be reelected again in 2004. By 2008, he stepped down and served as Prime Minister once again only to be reelected as President in 2012. In all of his years of rule, Vladimir Putin proved himself to be a successful leader of Russia due to his economic policies, effective military reforms, and treatment of his people.
Stalin was “born in Gori, Georgia” as the third and only surviving child of a “cobbler and ex-serf”(Compton’s 403). His true name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. “In 1912 he took the alias of ‘Stalin’, from the Russian word stal, meaning ‘steel”, hence his nickname “Man of Steel”(Compton’s 402). Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity, where he was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students. In 1899, just about the time of graduation, he gave up his religious education and to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1902 Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police for organizing a large worker’s demonstration. A year later he was sentenced to “exile in the Russian region of Siberia, but soon managed to escape and was back in Georgia by early 1904”(Archer 58). When the Russian Social Democratic Party split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, Stalin sided with the Bolsheviks, who just happened to be led by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin immediately became a staunch follower of Lenin, studying his every move. He did marry in 1905 but his beloved bride died of tuberculosis two years later. Their son, Yasha, died later in a Nazi Prison camp during World War II. After the Bolshevik’s Civil War victory, Stalin became highly organized and was elected secretary of the Communist Party. “After Lenin’s death, Stalin gradually isolated and shunned his political rivals, especially Leon Trotsky, and by the end of 1929 Joseph Stalin had succeeded in eliminating his opponents and became the supreme leader of the USSR” (Compton’s 404).
With humble beginnings, as Vladimir himself put it in his autobiography, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born October 7th, 1952, within St. Petersburg, Russia. Raised by his mother Maria, who was a factory worker, and his father Vladimir, who was a conscript. Putin was dead set on joining the KGB, the Committee for State Security. In his autobiography he says he was “a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.” But he also says that most of this “notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories” In short, he never knew what he was getting into. To follow...
Gorbachev’s Failed Attempts to Reform the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in March 1985, was the most. gifted and dynamic leader Russia has seen for many years. He was determined to transform and revitalise the country after the sterile years following Krushchev’s fall. The two key ideas were glasnost. (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
What is a hero? A hero can be classified as a number of things. A hero can be a person who in the opinions of others has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal. Ervin Staub, a holocaust survivor from Hungary and as scholar on altruistic behavior, has written, "Goodness like evil often begins in small steps. Heroes evolve; they aren't born. Very often the rescuers make only a small commitment at the start, to hide someone for a day or two. But once they had taken that step, they begin to see themselves differently, as someone who helps. What starts as mere willingness becomes intense involvement." The business man, Oskar Schindler, demonstrated a powerful example
A comparison of these two are Both leaders saw that changes were essential, they knew that without reforms, the Soviet Union would grow weaker and weaker. Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s reforms were wide and touched almost all important aspects of the government. One important aspect is how Khrushchev and Gorbachev saw the past and future. When Khrushchev came to power he had a big problem how to replace Stalin and how to rule the country after him. Stalin ruled through a cult of personality and many people thought that he was irreplaceable. At “the Twentieth Congress of the Khrushchev attacks Stalinism and the Cult of Personality in the secret speech, he denounced Stalin and the terror of his regime, everything Stalin did or said was incorrect,
The purpose of this investigation is to assess how significant Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost, and Perestroika polices contribute to the collapse of the USSR. In order to understand how significant of a factor Gorbachev policies were to the collapse of the USSR, we will investigate from how significant were the reforms emplaced by Gorbachev, to how the USSR was doing economically from the time Gorbachev came into power. The main sources for this investigation range from an Excerpt from The cold war: The United States and the Soviet union by Ronald Powaski who states facts about both the economic and political issues of the time. Excerpts from “New political thinking” from perestroika by Gorbachev which states how he believes new political ideas are for the good for the USSR. Finally in The Dissolution of the Soviet Union by Myra Immell who goes over many of the factors of the USSR’s collapse.