Mikhail Gorbachev

Early Life and Career (1931–1985)

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 into a peasant family in the village of Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeisky District, Stavropol Territory. According to the biographical chronology on the Nobel Prize website, he worked as an assistant combine-harvester operator as a teenager and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1949; he entered the Faculty of Law at Moscow University in 1950, joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952, and in 1955 graduated and married Raisa Titorenko. He then rose through Komsomol and Party posts in Stavropol, becoming First Secretary of the Stavropol Territory Party Committee in 1970 and a member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1971; in 1978 he moved to Moscow as Central Committee secretary for agriculture, and in 1980 he became the youngest full member of the Politburo.

General Secretary and Reform (1985–1991)

In March 1985 the Central Committee elected Gorbachev General Secretary of the CPSU. He went on to pursue the policies known as perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), and a foreign policy of "new thinking". In March 1990 the Soviet Union created the post of president, and he became, as Xinhua put it, the first and last President of the Soviet Union. That year the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize "for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations". After the failed coup by hardliners in August 1991 he resigned as General Secretary and dissolved the Central Committee; on 25 December 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, he resigned as President.

Normalising Sino-Soviet Relations (1985–1989)

According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry's review of PRC diplomatic history, special envoys of the two governments held talks on normalisation from October 1982, with China citing three "obstacles": Soviet support for Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, the heavy troop deployments on the Sino-Soviet and Sino-Mongolian borders, and the armed occupation of Afghanistan; twelve rounds of talks were held up to June 1988. The Soviet Union then began withdrawing troops from Mongolia and Afghanistan and said it would help bring about a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia; the foreign ministers exchanged visits in late 1988 and early 1989 and fixed the dates of Gorbachev's visit to China.

From 15 to 18 May 1989 Gorbachev, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and General Secretary of the CPSU, paid an official visit to China — the first Sino-Soviet summit in thirty years. On the morning of 16 May Deng Xiaoping received him, and the two leaders announced the normalisation of relations between the two states and the two parties; a Sino-Soviet joint communiqué was issued on the 18th. Deng told him: "The purpose of our meeting can be summed up in eight characters: end the past, open up the future." Recalling Tsarist Russia's seizure of Chinese territory and the Soviet troop build-up on the Chinese and Mongolian borders from the 1960s, he said that "now that the historical accounts have been aired, these issues can be blown away", and proposed that in their exchanges the two countries should "do more practical things and talk less empty words". According to the Foreign Ministry, Gorbachev agreed and said that the Soviet side considered itself partly at fault for the earlier deterioration of relations.

The Visit and the 1989 Beijing Protests

Gorbachev's visit came at the height of the student protest movement in Beijing: on 13 May students in Tiananmen Square began a hunger strike demanding that the government recognise the movement as patriotic and hold a dialogue with student representatives before his arrival; the summit drew large numbers of international media to Beijing, giving the protests worldwide exposure. During the visit, the CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang told Gorbachev: "On the most important questions, Comrade Deng Xiaoping is still needed at the helm." The report by Li Peng on Zhao's "mistakes", adopted at the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Committee in June 1989, said this remark had "made the situation worse still".

Later Years and Death

During his presidency, on 16 May 1991, the two countries signed the Agreement on the Eastern Section of the Sino-Soviet Boundary in Moscow, which Russia inherited after the Soviet collapse. After leaving office he headed, from 1992, the Foundation for Social, Economic and Political Research, a think-tank founded after the August coup. Gorbachev died in Moscow on 30 August 2022. The next day the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a press conference: "Mr Gorbachev made positive contributions to the normalisation of China-Soviet relations. We express our condolences on his passing and sympathies to his family."

Scholarship and Assessment

In the West he is widely regarded, as the Nobel citation reflects, as a key figure in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end. Sergey Radchenko's Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (2014), based on archives in Russia, China, India and elsewhere and on interviews with policymakers, examines how Soviet leaders from Brezhnev to Gorbachev saw Asia as a theatre for superpower contestation, and why their regional policies ultimately failed.