Mikhail Gorbachev, Leader of Extraordinary Contradictions: A Biography

FAIN: FB-53500-08

William Taubman
Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002-2372)

When Gorbachev became its leader in 1985, the USSR was a superpower. By 1991 the cold war was over, and when he left office in December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Of course, Gorbachev was not solely responsible for this remarkable upheaval. But he set decisive changes in motion, and no one else could have done so. Although several short Gorbachev biographies exist, as do studies of his reforms, there is no full, scholarly biography based on the wealth of new information that continues to become available. How did Gorbachev become the man who dismantled the Soviet system? Why did that system submit so readily to dismantling? What was the effect on Gorbachev, the man as well as the political leader, of helping to destroy the system (and the country) he set out to save? As I did with Khrushchev, I want to place Gorbachev at the intersection of history and personality, to show how his character took shape, and how it both reflected and altered his era.

Associated Products

Gorbachev: His Life and Times (Book)
Title: Gorbachev: His Life and Times
Author: William Taubman
Abstract: When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him “difficult to understand.” Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.
Year: 2017
Publisher: New York: W.W. Norton & Company
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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