Mikhail was a leader in both Russia and the Soviet Union. He was the leader of the Soviet Union for the last time. Mikhail was a great man who ended the Cold War without killing anyone, but he couldn’t stop the Soviet Union from falling apart. After his death, many famous people, like Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, and many more, paid tribute to him.
Official Russian news sources say that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died at the age of 91. Gorbachev’s office had said before that he was getting help at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow.
During his time as General Secretary, he oversaw a slowing down of the Cold War that led to the breakup of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Raisa Gorbacheva was the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev. Who was she?
The name of Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife is Raisa Gorbacheva. She had a hard life, just like Mikhail. Her childhood wasn’t easy at all.
The wife of Mikhail was born in Siberia. Even though she couldn’t read or write until she was in her 20s, the hard-working woman found a seat at Moscow State University.
At college, the young student met her future husband. They got married in 1953. During their marriage, the Gorbachevs were the real power couple.
The Washington Post says that she played a unique role in her husband’s life during his time in the Soviet Union. She went with him to public events at home and abroad, watched out for him on his trips, and was one of his closest advisors.
If Mikhail couldn’t go to an event for any reason, Raisa was there for him. CBC News says that Raisa has been told she has leukemia. Mikhail lived with Raisa for more than 40 years, until she died in 1999.
Raisa and her husband had many of the same traits. They both worked hard to become well-known, ran for office, and, most importantly, loved each other until death.
Meet Daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya: Did Mikhail Gorbachev Have A Son?
As a child, Mikhail Gorbachev only had a daughter. He didn’t have a son. Mikhail only has one child, Irina Virganskaya.
Even though many Americans hate communist officials, Irina remembers her dad as a loving, but careful, family man.
Gorbechev’s daughter and granddaughters grew up in the public eye while his wife was dying, and they were very used to it.
Irina worked at the Cardiology Center after she got her Ph.D. and graduated from the institute.
In 1994, Mikhail told his daughter to join the group. She had turned 37. But she decided to go to business school, so she quit her job. After she graduated, she went to work for the Gorbachev Foundation.
When Irina’s mother died, she packed up her apartment in one day, took her girls, and went to her father Mikhail’s dacha.
Before he died, Mikhail Gorbachev’s net worth was:
At the time of his death, Mikhail Gorbachev was worth a lot less than Vladimir Putin. Celebrity Net Worth says that Gorbachev had a net worth of $5 million before he died.
The same source also says that Gorbachev used to like Putin, but that he later “denounced” him. Still, it is not clear if this change of heart had a big effect on Gorbachev’s income.
In his later years, Gorbachev was still interested in politics. He also grew by putting out an album of songs about his late wife Raisa. The money from the album went to charity.
What Was The Cause Of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Death? Update on health and illness
Mikhail Gorbachev’s cause of death has not been made public, but his health was not good before he died.
Gorbachev was taken to the hospital more than once to treat different health problems. In 2019, Gorbachev was hospitalized with pneumonia, but he got better.
The former politician was hospitalized to check on his health during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Since then, his health has been getting worse and worse.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told his spokesman Dmitry Peskov that he was very sad about the death of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Stavropol kray, Russia, U.S.S.R. He died on August 30, 2022, in Moscow, Russia. He was a Soviet official who was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. His work to make his country’s government more democratic and its economy less centralized helped bring down communism and break up the Soviet Union in 1991. Gorbachev won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990, in part because he ended the Soviet Union’s rule over eastern Europe after World War II.
Early years
Gorbachev was born to Russian farmers in the territory of Stavropol in the southwest of the country. In 1946, he joined the Komsomol (Young Communist League), and for the next four years, he drove a combine harvester on a state farm in Stavropol. He did well in the Komsomol, and in 1952 he went to Moscow State University’s law school and joined the Communist Party. In 1955, he got his law degree. After that, he worked for both the Komsomol and the regular party organizations in Stavropol. In 1970, he became the first secretary of the regional party committee.
Perestroika led to the fall of the Soviet Union, said the General Secretary of the CPSU.
Find out about Mikhail Gorbachev, his perestroika policy, and what he did to help end the Cold War
In 1971, Gorbachev was put on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and in 1978, he was put in charge of agriculture for the party. In 1979, he was a candidate member of the Politburo, and in 1980, he was a full member. A lot of his steady rise in the party was due to Mikhail Suslov’s support, who was the most important party thinker. During Yury Andropov’s 15-month term as general secretary of the Communist Party (1982–1984), Mikhail Gorbachev became one of the Politburo’s most active and visible members. After Andropov died and Konstantin Chernenko took over as general secretary in February 1984, Gorbachev became a likely candidate to take over from Chernenko. Chernenko died on March 10, 1985. The next day, the Politburo chose Gorbachev to be the CPSU’s general secretary. When he joined the Politburo, he was still the youngest person there.
Gorbachev moved quickly to increase his own power in the Soviet government. His main goal at home was to get the Soviet economy going again after years of low growth and drift while Leonid Brezhnev was in charge (1964–82). To do this, he called for a quick modernization of technology and a rise in worker productivity. He also tried to make the Soviet bureaucracy less slow and more responsive.
Do you know when things almost got hot during the Cold War? This quiz will test what you know about the Cold War
When these small changes didn’t make a difference, Gorbachev made deeper changes to the Soviet economic and political system in 1987 and 1988. Under his new “openness” (glasnost) policy, there was a major cultural thaw: freedoms of speech and information were greatly increased; the press and broadcasting were given the freedom to report and criticize in a way that had never been done before; and the country’s history of totalitarian rule under Stalin was eventually completely rejected by the government. Under Gorbachev’s “restructuring” (perestroika) policy, the first small steps were taken to make the Soviet political system more democratic. For example, in some elections for party and government positions, there were multiple candidates and a secret ballot. Some limited free-market mechanisms also started to be added to the Soviet economy during perestroika, but even these small economic changes were met with strong opposition from party and government bureaucrats who didn’t want to give up their control over the country’s economy.
From the start, Gorbachev worked to improve relations and trade with the developed countries of both the West and the East. In December 1987, he and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed an agreement for their two countries to destroy all intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles. In 1988 and 1989, he was in charge of getting Soviet troops out of Afghanistan after they had been there for nine years.
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By becoming chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet in October 1988, Gorbachev was able to keep his power (the national legislature). But the Communist Party was getting in the way of Gorbachev’s economic reforms, so he tried to restructure the government’s legislative and executive branches to free them from the CPSU’s control. So, in December 1988, changes were made to the constitution that led to the creation of a new two-chamber parliament called the U.S.S.R. Congress of People’s Deputies. Some of its members were directly elected by the people in contested elections, where there were more than one candidate. In 1989, the newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies chose a new U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet from among its own members. Unlike its predecessor with the same name, this Supreme Soviet was a real parliament with real legislative power. Gorbachev was re-elected president of the country in May 1989 when he was named chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
Gorbachev was the most important person who started a series of events in 1989 and 1990 that changed Europe’s politics and marked the start of the end of the Cold War. He used every chance he got in 1989 to show his support for reformist communists in the countries of eastern Europe that were part of the Soviet bloc. When the communist regimes in these countries fell like dominoes at the end of that year, Gorbachev didn’t say anything to stop it. As democratically elected, noncommunist governments took over in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in late 1989 and early 1990, Gorbachev agreed to slowly pull Soviet troops out of those countries. By the summer of 1990, he had agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany. He also agreed to the idea that the reunified country might join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had always been the Soviet Union’s enemy. Gorbachev won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990 because he had done so much to improve international relations.
Gorbachev’s democratization and decentralization of his country’s political system gave people more freedoms. This led to civil unrest in some of the republics, like Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan, and direct attempts to break away from the Soviet Union in others (e.g., Lithuania). In response, Gorbachev used the military to stop the bloody fighting between different ethnic groups in several Central Asian republics in 1989 and 1990. At the same time, constitutional changes were made that would make it legal for a republic to leave the U.S.S.R.
Gorbachev sped up the transfer of power from the party to elected government institutions in 1990. At the time, the CPSU was losing power and prestige because people were becoming more interested in democratic politics. In March of that year, the Congress of People’s Deputies chose him to be the first president of the U.S.S.R., which was a new position with a lot of power. At the same time, the Congress, which he led, ended the Soviet Union’s constitution, which gave the Communist Party a monopoly on political power. This made it possible for other political parties to become legal.
Gorbachev did a great job of getting rid of the totalitarian parts of the Soviet state and moving his country toward a real representative democracy. He was less willing, though, to free the Soviet economy from centralized state control. Gorbachev didn’t use the totalitarian use of power that had worked in the past to keep the Soviet economy going, but he also didn’t make a big change to private ownership and the use of free-market mechanisms. Gorbachev tried to find a middle ground between these two very different options, but he failed. Without private business to replace the centrally planned economy, it continued to fall apart. Gorbachev was still the undisputed leader of the failing Communist Party, but his attempts to get more power as president through decrees and administrative shuffles failed, and his government’s authority and effectiveness started to go downhill in a big way. Faced with a collapsing economy, growing public anger, and the continued transfer of power to the constituent republics, Gorbachev changed his mind. In late 1990, he joined forces with party conservatives and security organs.
But the Communist hard-liners who had replaced the reformers in the government turned out to be unreliable allies. From August 19 to 21, 1991, Gorbachev and his family were put under house arrest by the hard-liners during a short-lived coup. After the coup failed because of strong opposition from Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other reformers who had come to power because of democratic reforms, Gorbachev went back to his job as president of the Soviet Union. However, his position had already been weakened so much that it could not be fixed. Gorbachev had no choice but to work with Yeltsin, so he left the Communist Party, got rid of its Central Committee, and backed moves to take away the party’s control over the KGB and the military. Gorbachev also moved quickly to give the republics that made up the Soviet Union important political powers. But events moved faster than he could, and the Russian government under Yeltsin quickly took over the duties of the falling Soviet government. The different republics also agreed to join Yeltsin’s new commonwealth. Gorbachev quit as president of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, which was the last day of the Soviet Union.
The rest of Mikhail Gorbachev’s life
Gorbachev ran for president of Russia in 1996, but he got less than 1% of the vote. Still, he stayed involved in public life as a speaker and a member of different global and Russian think tanks. In 2006, he worked with Russian billionaire and former lawmaker Aleksandr Lebedev to buy nearly half of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which was known for being willing to challenge Kremlin policies. Gorbachev and Lebedev were supposed to start a new political party on September 30, 2008, but this never happened. Even though Gorbachev was sometimes critical of Vladimir Putin, he was in favor of Russia taking over Crimea during the Ukraine crisis in 2014.