• Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow on August 30. He was 91.

• Gorbachev, who was in power between 1985 and 1991 and helped bring US-Soviet relations out of a deep freeze, was the last surviving Cold War leader.

• Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state.

• Gorbachev was regarded fondly in the West, where he was affectionately referred to by the nickname Gorby and best known for defusing US-Soviet nuclear tensions in the 1980s as well as bringing Eastern Europe out from behind the Iron Curtain.

A rapid rise through the ranks of the Communist Party

• Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoye in Russia’s southern Stavropol region. 

• At 16, he was awarded the Red Banner of Labour for helping in a record harvest, and in 1950 he won a coveted place at Moscow State University to study law. There, he joined the Communist Party.

• His early career coincided with the thaw begun by Nikita Khrushchev. He began a rapid rise through the ranks of the Communist Party, becoming the youngest member of the Politburo in 1979.

• Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, and was succeeded by two other geriatric leaders: Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev’s mentor, and Konstantin Chernenko. It wasn’t until March 1985, when Chernenko died, that the party finally chose a younger man to lead the country: Gorbachev. He was 54.

Glasnost and perestroika

• His tenure was filled with rocky periods, including the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

• But starting in November 1985, Gorbachev began a series of attention-grabbing summits with world leaders, especially US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, which led to unprecedented, deep reductions in the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals.

• He defused the US-Soviet nuclear standoff with a series of disarmament agreements, withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and loosened the reins on the leadership of Moscow’s Eastern European satellite countries.

• Soon after taking power, Gorbachev began a campaign to end his country’s economic and political stagnation, using glasnost (or openness), to help achieve his goal of perestroika (or restructuring). At home, his perestroika and glasnost policies set off seismic changes. Those two transliterations of Russian words were synonymous with his campaign for reforming Soviet society through policies. 

• His decline was humiliating. His power hopelessly sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on December 25, 1991. The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later.

• By the end of his rule, he was powerless to halt the whirlwind he had started. Yet Gorbachev may have had a greater impact on the second half of the 20th century than any other political figure.

• As the USSR collapsed, Gorbachev was superseded by the younger Boris Yeltsin, who became post-Soviet Russia’s first president.

Blamed for the collapse of the Soviet Union

• He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for negotiating a historic nuclear arms pact with US leader Ronald Reagan and his decision to withhold the Soviet army when the Berlin Wall fell a year earlier was seen as key to preserving Cold War peace. Yet, he was widely despised at home.

• Russians blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union — a once-fearsome superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate nations. 

• Many still blame him for the collapse of the Soviet Union — which President Vladimir Putin famously called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century — and the years of economic upheaval and political turmoil that followed, including wars from the Caucasus to Chechnya and Central Asia.

• He made a disastrous attempt to return to politics and ran for president in 1996 but received less than 1 per cent of the vote.

• In 1997, he resorted to making a TV ad for Pizza Hut to earn money for his charitable foundation. 

• He spent much of the past two decades on the political periphery, intermittently calling for the Kremlin and the White House to mend ties as tensions soared to Cold War levels since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched an offensive in Ukraine earlier this year.

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