Early life[edit]
Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family[6] of migrants from Voronezh and Chernigov Governorates. As a child, Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in 1933] nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father."Both of his grandfathers were arrested on false charges in the 1930s; his paternal grandfather Andrey Moiseyevich Gorbachev (Андрей Моисеевич Горбачёв) was sent to exile in Siberia.
His father was a combine harvester operator and Red Army veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev. According to Gorbachev, during World War II his father "defended Kursk, forded the Dnieper knee-deep in blood and was wounded in Czechoslovakia."
His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née Gopkalo), was a kolkhoz worker.[9He was brought up mainly by his Ukrainian maternal grandparents. In his teens, he became a leader in the Komsomol, a Communist youth organization. He operated combine harvesters on collective farms and won the Red Labor Banner in 1949 for helping his father break harvesting records.
He entered Moscow State University in 1950 and graduated in 1955 with a degree in law.[11] While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and soon became very active within the party. He also became close friends with Zdenek Mlynar, who would become the primary ideologist of the Prague Spring in 1968. The two men influenced each other as they became disillusioned with Stalinism.
In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence master's degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture.
Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, daughter of a Ukrainian railway engineer, at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya (Ири́на Миха́йловна Вирга́нская), in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999.[12] Gorbachev has two granddaughters (Ksenia and Anastasia) and one great-granddaughter (Aleksandra).
He has been credited with playing a major role in ending the Cold war, in both the East and also the West.
In 1991 conservative military forces attempted a coup where the life of Gorbachev was in serious jeopardy. The Coup eventually failed but on returning to Moscow political power had shifted from the Politburo to modernizers such as Yeltsin. Gorbachev resigned and never made a successful return to Russian politics.
In 1991 conservative military forces attempted a coup where the life of Gorbachev was in serious jeopardy. The Coup eventually failed but on returning to Moscow political power had shifted from the Politburo to modernizers such as Yeltsin. Gorbachev resigned and never made a successful return to Russian politics.
Raisa Maximova, Gorbachev’s wife died of Leukaemia in 1999. They had one daughter, Irina.
Although unpopular in Russia for his perceived role in the breakup of the Soviet Union, he remains an influential voice. Although he had previously supported Putin, In 2011 Gorbachev criticised his third term as Russian President. He was also critical of the democratic deficit in the 2011 elections. Gorbachev has also warned against a new ‘cold war’ and argued that America and the West need to be careful in interfering in Russian affairs and Russian spheres of influence.