Mikhail Gorbachev, last Soviet leader, 1931-2022

{"text":[[{"start":13.83,"text":"Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the last leader of the Soviet Union and its first and last state president. "},{"start":21.247,"text":"Although he ruled in Moscow for less than seven years, the consequences of his tenure rewrote the global order at the end of the 20th century. "}],[{"start":28.98,"text":"During his years in the Kremlin, from 1985 to 1991, he ended one-party communist rule in the Soviet Union, halted the global arms race and allowed the peaceful liberation of the states of central and eastern Europe. "},{"start":41.284,"text":"His policies terminated the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and ended the cold war but led to the collapse of the Soviet empire in the process. "}],[{"start":49.5,"text":"Lauded in the west as a hero and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he was and still is condemned by many in Russia for wrecking its economy and putting paid to its superpower status. "},{"start":59.817,"text":"In reality, he attempted to reform a system that was in terminal decline, and thereby triggered a revolution that he could not control. "}],[{"start":67.72,"text":"In contrast to his predecessors, Gorbachev was articulate and charismatic. "},{"start":72.562,"text":"He was also a brilliant tactician in the politics he knew best: manipulating the party. "},{"start":77.229,"text":"His instincts were democratic but his experience was bureaucratic. "},{"start":80.922,"text":"He was a pragmatist who could never quite bring himself to abandon his communist roots and throw in his lot with the most radical reformers. "},{"start":87.664,"text":"As a result, he ended up despised by diehard conservatives and liberal democrats alike. "}],[{"start":93.22,"text":"Gorbachev was an outstanding student of the Soviet system — the first party leader to have attended university, followed by a stellar career through the party bureaucracy. "},{"start":102.087,"text":"Yet he eventually dismantled the totalitarian state created by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. "},{"start":107.592,"text":"As he wrote in his autobiography in 1995, he was “a product of the nomenklatura [the party elite] and at the same time . . . its grave digger”. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":116.55,"text":"Unanimously elected as party general secretary in 1985 when aged just 54, he was the first relatively young and vigorous leader of a system ruled for decades by elderly men. "},{"start":126.979,"text":"Although his elevation was regarded with initial suspicion in Washington and other western capitals, it signalled the start of a “second Russian Revolution” that proved unstoppable. "}],[{"start":136.45,"text":"Gorbachev embarked on what he called perestroika — restructuring. "},{"start":140.59199999999998,"text":"The slogan was chosen to sound unthreatening. "},{"start":143.397,"text":"The intention was to reform the communist system, to make it more efficient and humane. "},{"start":148.177,"text":"But given the stagnation throughout the economy and society, he knew it would require radical change. "}],[{"start":154.04999999999998,"text":"On the eve of his election as party leader, he told his wife Raisa: “We can’t go on living like this. ”"},{"start":159.84199999999998,"text":"Yet as each attempt to revitalise the economy was thwarted by an entrenched and corrupt bureaucracy, he switched to ever more fundamental political transformation that came to threaten the leading role of the Communist party itself. "}],[{"start":171.29,"text":"Gorbachev’s greatest successes were on the world stage, where he overcame deep mutual suspicion and forged close ties with Ronald Reagan, then US president, and his successor George HW Bush. "},{"start":182.119,"text":"After a 1984 meeting with Margaret Thatcher, she famously concluded: “I like Mr Gorbachev. "},{"start":188.04899999999998,"text":"I think we can do business together. ”"}],[{"start":191.14,"text":"In the west, his easy smile, intelligence and charm inspired “Gorbymania” from the crowds who mobbed him on his travels with the glamorous and intelligent Raisa in the 1980s. "},{"start":200.61899999999997,"text":"In Germany he was most popular of all, thanks to his role in backing unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":207.66,"text":"His “new thinking” was instrumental in ending the ideological confrontation between east and west. "},{"start":212.927,"text":"Seeing a direct link between ruinous military expenditure and the sorry state of the Soviet economy, he set out to end the global arms race. "},{"start":220.194,"text":"He promoted the idea of a nuclear weapons-free world by 2000 and pulled Soviet troops out of their disastrous intervention in Afghanistan. "}],[{"start":228.64,"text":"In the USSR, however, his perestroika unleashed forces he could not control. "},{"start":234.094,"text":"His initial popularity, boosted by televised walkabouts and frank public debates, faded as his reforms failed to transform the domestic economy and improve ordinary lives. "},{"start":243.78699999999998,"text":"Perestroika sought to promote private initiative without dismantling the ossified state planning system or allowing a real market economy. "},{"start":250.94199999999998,"text":"The result was a collapse in state-controlled production and chaos in the distribution of goods. "}],[{"start":256.79999999999995,"text":"Glasnost, or transparency, the other pillar of his transformation process, also had unintended consequences. "},{"start":263.75399999999996,"text":"It was supposed to be a carefully orchestrated opening of the media to expose the sins of the past and outmanoeuvre opponents of reform. "},{"start":270.572,"text":"By removing draconian restrictions on information, however, it resulted in a diversity of opinion and public debate that exposed the entire power structure to devastating criticism. "}],[{"start":281.09999999999997,"text":"When he arranged in 1986 — behind the backs of the KGB secret police — to end the exile of Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet nuclear bomb, he liberated a man who rapidly became the moral conscience of the country. "},{"start":293.81699999999995,"text":"The most famous Soviet dissident wanted genuine democracy and an end to the “leading role” of the Communist party. "},{"start":299.484,"text":"In 1989, at the Congress of People’s Deputies, a grudging Gorbachev gave him the platform to say so. "},{"start":305.96399999999994,"text":"The nation stopped work to watch them argue on live TV and, from that moment, the revolution was unstoppable. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"