Mikhail Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Russia. In 1961, he became a delegate to the Communist Party Congress. He was elected general secretary in 1985. He became the first president of the Soviet Union in 1990, and won the Nobel Prize for Peace that same year. He resigned in 1991, and has since founded the Gorbachev Foundation and remains active in social and political causes.
EARLY LIFE
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian family in the village of Privolnoye, in the Krasnogvardeisky District near the Stavropol Territory of southern Russia.
Gorbachev’s parents were peasants. His father, Sergei, operated a combine harvester for a living. Sergei was drafted into the Russian Army when the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941. Three years later, he was wounded in action and returned home to resume operating farm machinery. Sergei passed on his experience with a combine harvester to his young son, Mikhail. Mikhail Gorbachev was a quick learner and showed an aptitude for mechanics.
As a teenager, Gorbachev contributed to the family’s income by driving tractors at a local machine station. So hard a worker was he that, by the age of 17, Gorbachev was the youngest ever to win the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for his active role in bringing in that year’s bumper crop. Gorbachev’s mother, Maria, exemplified this tireless work ethic with her lifelong toil on a collective farm.
The political climate during Mikhail Gorbachev’s upbringing was turbulent. In the 1930s, when Gorbachev was still very young, he suffered the trauma of seeing his maternal grandfather, Pantelei Gopkalo, arrested during the Great Purge. Gopkalo was accused of being a Trotskyite counterrevolutionary and wa...
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...em of how to balance the shared power between him and the opposing leader.
In August 1991, while Gorbachev was vacationing in the Crimea, Communist conservatives captured him in a coup to seize power. Ironically, among the Communist Party conservatives who organized the coup was Prime Minister Pavlov, whom Gorbachev had hired to help him balance power with Yeltsin.
Despite his opposing leadership, Yeltsin manned a resistance against the coup, and the coup ultimately failed. Upon Gorbachev’s return home, rumors circulated that he may have been in cahoots with the coup leaders. The public grew distrustful of Gorbachev and was increasingly supportive of Yeltsin, whom they now viewed as a hero.
By Christmas 1991, the Soviet Union had crumbled. Gorbachev inevitably stepped down from his position as president of the Soviet Union, handing over complete power to Yeltsin.
The Legacy of Russia and the Soviet Union - Authoritarian and Repressive Traditions that Refuse to Die
Lydia Chekovskaya wrote about Sofia Petrovna and the transformation she had undergone to closely reflect the state of mind and changes experienced by citizens of the Soviet Union during that time. As people began to suffer from the purges and other hardships due to Stalin’s incompetence, their minds and logic, much like Sofia Petrovna’s, became impaired leading them to try their best to rationalize Stalin’s actions. They believed in the party wholeheartedly, but when they finally realized the wrongdoing of the party, it was far too late.
President Jimmy Carter was born October 1924 in a little town called Plains located in Georgia. As a young boy, he grew up in Archery a little nearby community and Jimmy Carter was drawn into farming just the same way his father James Earl Carter was. His family was surrounded by peanut crops, politic talk and being faithful to the Baptist religion. While he attended school in a public school of Plains his father took care of the crops and worked as a business man; his mother Lillian Gordy Carter was working as a registered nurse.
Gorbachev, though a member of the communist party, had a different outlook on the future of Russia and communism. He was a child during Stalin’s time in power, and couldn’t truly remember the purges, gulags, and the famines. Gorbachev spent most of his time in office actively trying to reform a failing Communist Party. He put a lot of time into improving foreign relations after the Cold War with the policy of detente, (or “relaxation”). Gorbachev met with Margaret Thatcher at Konstantin Chernenko’s funeral. He held arms talks with Ronald Reagan at the Geneva Summit in 1985, and created a good relationship with the American leader. (10) He also loosened The USSR’s hold on the Warsaw Pact countries by ending the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1988. This led the communist regime in these countries to be overthrown. Gorbachev’s main foreign policy goal when he took office was to end the Cold War; 25% of the gross national GDP was going towards defense, and Gorbachev wanted to push more of that money towards other things to help his plan for a free market economy (9). In 1987 Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate Ranges Nuclear Forces treaty (8) and after many more summit conferences, START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was signed by the USSR and the United States, effectively ending the Cold
In the second term of Reagan’s presidency, a warming of bilateral relations between the Soviet Union and the United States was initiated which began in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev and Reagan were able to work together because Gorbachev contrasted the policies of his predecessor Leonid Brezhnev. Although Brezhnev was not the immediate predecessor of Gorbachev, the Brezhnev Era was considered the Era preceding the Gorbachev Era because Brezhnev’s successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko only served from 1982, which was Brezhnev’s death to 1985 when Gorbachev assumed power. The three years between both Eras, Brezhnev’s policies were still being implemented and no significant reforms or changes
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.
Leon Trotsky was born on October 26, 1879 in the Southern Ulkaine. His real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Leon's parents were simple Jewish farmers who lived better than most peasants at the time. At the age of 9, Leon moved to Odessa to live with some relatives and attend a prestigious private school. His father hoped that Leon would return home as an engineer, but instead he became attracte...
At 7:32 p.m. December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag, which symbolized the disintegration of Soviet Union. Early in day, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned his post, and Boris Yeltsin became the president of the newly independent Russian state. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the campaign between Soviet Union and the United States ended. Nonetheless, although the end of cold war make people around the world enters a peaceful time, until now both people in the past and historians are amazed why previous powerful Soviet Union collapsed suddenly. Thereby, the cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union
Ultimately, I believe that Mikhail Gorbachev had the greatest impact in bringing about the end of the Cold War with his sweeping changes to foreign policy, the economy, and the Soviet political system. He took the lead when it came to negotiating arms reductions with Reagan and when inviting new partnerships with Western corporations. Before Gorbachev was in power Reagan was committed to restarting the arms race. Later Reagan followed suit when Gorbachev led the way in the reduction of arms. The policy of the Reagan Doctrine was to fund and support resistance groups while Gorbachev worked instead to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan and worked to stop the U. S. supported revolt in Angola.
To further transform the Soviet Union, state officials encouraged citizens to help improve the literacy rate and recognize the many heroes of the socialist state. These heroes, including Joseph Stalin, “received huge amounts of fan mail and were lionized on appearances throughout the country” (72). They also encouraged the remaking of individuals, particularly through work. Before the transformation, many did not enjoy working, but “under socialism, it was the thing that filled life with meaning” (75). Numerous interviews an author had with “transformed” felons, illustrated that even criminals could be transformed into good citizens through work (76). However, Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that these interviews were “clearly a propaganda project.”
August 28,1828, a soon to be important figure in the Russian Revolution was born. Lev Devid Bronshtein, also known as Leon Trotsky, lived in Tula Province, Russia as the youngest of four children on his family’s estate. When he was two, his mother died, so their father’s cousin, Tatyana Ergolky, took charge over the children. Then in 1837, tragedy again struck when Leon’s father died. The children were then handed off to their aunt, Alexandra Osten-Saken, who became their legal guardian. Yet when she died in 1840, they went to Pelageya Yushkov, another one of their father’s sisters. There they were given German and French tutors and though Trotsky was not very good student, he excelled at games. Kazan University was the first real school he went to in 1843 as he planed on having a diplomatic career, but left in 1847 with no degree. Determined, Trotsky return...
“The man who turned the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower at unimaginable human cost (Joseph Stalin).” “Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia (Joseph Stalin).” Permanently scarred from a childhood bout with smallpox and having a mildly deformed arm, Stalin always felt unfairly treated by life, and thus developed a strong, romanticized desire for greatness and respect, combined with a shrewd streak of calculating cold-heartedness towards those who had maligned him. “He always felt a sense of inferiority before educated intellectuals, and particularly distrusted them (Joseph Stalin).”
Gorbachev be released. On August 21, only two days later the communists in the rebellion gave themselves up and were imprisoned. Yeltsin wanted to end communism, so he forced Gorbachev to end the communist party. By December 1991 the USSR had broken up. On December 25 Gorbachev resigned and Yeltsin was now in control of the nuclear weapons. Despite the ending of the Cold War there are still many nuclear weapons in the world. There is still the slight possibility of a nuclear war.
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.
Originally born as Joseph Vissaiovich Djugashvili, Joseph Stalin was born in a little town of Gori, Georgia, December 18, 1878. Along in his 30s, Joseph took Stalin for the Russian name, “man of steel.” Stalin was very unfortunate as a child. He had an alcoholic, abusive father. His father’s occupation was a shoemaker. His mother, however, was a laundress (“Joseph”).