It is sobering that Mikhail Gorbachev has passed away at a time when political repression in his native Russia has become stifling once more
Few world leaders have cut a more consequential but ultimately tragic figure than Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose death at the age of 91 has been announced by Russian state media.
Gorbachev’s achievements Gorbachev’s accomplishments were numerous. They included the negotiation of arms reduction treaties with the United States during a number of summits with US President Ronald Reagan. His suggestion to Reagan in Reykjavik that the US and USSR should eliminate nuclear weapons blindsided a US foreign policy establishment that initially saw Gorbachev as little more than a younger version of the gerontocrats he had succeeded.
And perhaps most notably, he was the chief architect of a grand plan to revitalise the Soviet Union’s economy , its society , and its politics . Casting himself as a vigorous opponent of corruption, Gorbachev was promoted to the Party’s Central Committee, and then to the Politburo, the main policymaking body of the USSR. When the Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, Andropov took the reins and gave Gorbachev increasing control over the economy.
The chief reason for this was that Gorbachev’s social reforms were far too successful, while his economic reforms were an abject failure. Perestroika served only to reveal how deeply inefficient and corrupt the Soviet command economy had become.
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