Moscow, December 25, 1991

Born on March 2, 1931, in a village on the fertile steppes of southern Russia, Gorbachev was an earnest communist from his teenage days. In his formative years the country was in thrall to Stalin’s cult of personality. At eighteen, he graduated from school with a silver medal for an essay entitled “Stalin—Our Combat Glory; Stalin—the Elation of Our Youth.” He studied law at Moscow State University, where he was open to new ideas, while aware that any deviation from the official line was, as he put it, “fraught with consequences.” He was active in the university Komsomol, the young communist movement. There he met Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, an earnest student in the philosophy department and a convinced believer in Marxism-Leninism, though her thesis on collective farms gave her an insight into the miserable life of peasants under communism. They married in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. In later years Gorbachev would joke that she was the head of “our family party cell.”

Conciliatory, smooth, and garrulous, Gorbachev was noticed by his elders as a natural-born political leader. He joined the party at the age of twenty-one and slipped easily into the role of apparatchik, a professional party member who makes a career in administration. Exceptionally, for a careerist, he looked at things with a critical eye. He became convinced early on that “there was something wrong in our country.” This was reinforced when he visited Czechoslovakia in 1969 with a party delegation and was met with rudeness by furious Czechs and Slovaks. The previous year, Soviet tanks had crushed the communist reform movement that had led to the Prague Spring and the promise of a more prosperous and just society.

In 1970 he was appointed first party secretary—akin to governor—in the Stavropol region, a rich agricultural area the size of West Virginia. Touring his fiefdom he found “sheer misery and complete devastation” everywhere. He met and charmed important Soviet figures who vacationed in nearby Black Sea resorts and who would later sponsor his upward climb. Eight years later he was brought to Moscow and shortly afterwards appointed to the Politburo, the syndicate of a dozen senior communist officials who determined everything in Soviet life, from war and peace to the price of vodka and bread rolls. He stood out among his older comrades with his combination of youthful energy, toughness, and effervescent optimism that problems could be solved with debate and imagination.

Though put in charge of agriculture, Gorbachev was sent abroad to get acquainted with foreign leaders. His suave manner and keen intellect charmed dignitaries more accustomed to impassive Soviet figures programmed to say nyet. He charmed Margaret Thatcher so much with his new thinking on international relations—consultation rather than confrontation—that the Iron Lady famously commented, “I like Mister Gorbachev. We can do business together.” Foreigners found him to be almost subversive. When a French official visiting Moscow asked when an agriculture problem had arisen that had delayed their meeting, the future general secretary replied with a smile, “In 1917.”

Gorbachev believed that the country was in a parlous state and could only be saved by fundamental reforms and the end of the Cold War. His comrade Eduard Shevardnadze shared this view. In December 1984, while vacationing together in the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda, the Georgian told him, “Everything’s rotten. It has to be changed.” It was almost heretical to utter such words aloud. Gorbachev now echoed them, in private, within hours of being given the top job by the Politburo. “We can’t go on living like this,” he told Raisa as they walked in their Moscow suburban garden, shivering in a temperature of 15 degrees Fahrenheit, after getting home at 4 a.m. from the Kremlin on March 12, 1985. Even the general secretary of the Communist Party would not risk saying such things indoors, for fear of KGB microphones.

Other influential voices urged him to make changes. Valery Boldin, a Pravda editor who had been his personal assistant for five years, warned him that a collapse in the economy could provoke a social explosion at any time.

When Gorbachev looked around for new blood in the party ranks, Yegor Ligachev, his silver-haired deputy, recommended Boris Yeltsin, the party chief in Sverdlovsk. “This is our type of person—we have to pick him!” enthused Ligachev.