On 11 March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected the eighth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the Politburo of the CPSU after the death of Konstantin Chernenko. He was the last general secretary and Soviet leader before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1978, he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central Committee; he joined the governing Politburo (25th term) as a non-voting candidate member in 1979 and a voting member in 1980.
While Gorbachev wanted to preserve the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninist ideals, he recognised the need for significant reforms. He decided to withdraw troops from the Soviet–Afghan War and met with United States president Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavik Summit to discuss the limitation of nuclear weapons production and ending the Cold War. He also proposed a three-stage programme for abolishing the world's nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century.
Domestically, his policy of glasnost ("openness") allowed for the improvement of freedom of speech and free press, while his perestroika ("restructuring") sought to decentralize economic decision-making to improve its efficiency. Ultimately, Gorbachev's democratization efforts and formation of the elected Congress of People's Deputies undermined the supremacy the CPSU had in Soviet governance. When various Warsaw Pact countries abandoned Marxist–Leninist governance in 1989, he declined to intervene militarily. Growing nationalist sentiment within constituent republics threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading the hardliners within the Communist Party to launch an unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. After the attempted coup, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes.
Background In November 1978, Gorbachev was appointed to the Central Committee's Secretariat for Agriculture (25th term), replacing his old patron Fyodor Kulakov, who had died of a heart attack. His appointment had been approved unanimously by the Central Committee's members. The harvests of 1979, 1980, and 1981 were all poor, due largely to weather conditions, and the country had to import increasing quantities of grain.He had growing concerns about the country's agricultural management system, coming to regard it as overly centralized and requiring more bottom-up decision making; he raised these points at his first speech at a Central Committee Plenum, given in July 1978. He began to have concerns about other policies too. In December 1979, the Soviets sent the armed forces into neighbouring Afghanistan to support its Soviet-aligned government against Islamist insurgents; Gorbachev privately thought it a mistake. At times he openly supported the government position; in October 1980 he for instance endorsed Soviet calls for Poland's Marxist–Leninist government to crack down on growing internal dissent in that country. That same month, he was promoted from a candidate non-voting member to a full voting member of the Politburo (25th term), becoming the youngest member of the highest decision-making authority in the Communist Party.
After Leonid Brezhnev's death in November 1982, Yuri Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary of the Communist Party, the de facto leader in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was enthusiastic about the appointment. However, although Gorbachev hoped that Andropov would introduce liberalizing reforms, the latter carried out only personnel shifts rather than structural change. Gorbachev became Andropov's closest ally in the Politburo; with Andropov's encouragement, Gorbachev sometimes chaired Politburo meetings. Andropov encouraged Gorbachev to expand into policy areas other than agriculture, preparing him for future higher office. In April 1983, in a sign of growing ascendancy, Gorbachev delivered the annual speech marking the birthday of the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin; this required him re-reading many of Lenin's later writings, in which the latter had called for reform in the context of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, and encouraged Gorbachev's own conviction that reform was needed. In May 1983, Gorbachev was sent to Canada, where he met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and spoke to the Canadian Parliament. There, he met and befriended the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Yakovlev, who later became a key political ally.
In February 1984, Andropov died; on his deathbed he indicated his desire that Gorbachev succeed him. Many in the Central Committee nevertheless thought the 53-year-old Gorbachev was too young and inexperienced. Instead, Konstantin Chernenko—a longstanding Brezhnev ally—was appointed general secretary, but he too was in very poor health. Chernenko was often too sick to chair Politburo meetings, with Gorbachev stepping in last minute. Gorbachev continued to cultivate allies both in the Kremlin and beyond, and also gave the main speech at a conference on Soviet ideology, where he angered party hardliners by implying that the country required reform.
In April 1984, Gorbachev was appointed chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Soviet legislature, a largely honorific position. In June he traveled to Italy as a Soviet representative for the funeral of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer, and in September to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to attend celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of its liberation from the Nazis by the Red Army. In December, he visited Britain at the request of its prime minister Margaret Thatcher; she was aware that he was a potential reformer and wanted to meet him. At the end of the visit, Thatcher said: "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together". He felt that the visit helped to erode Andrei Gromyko's dominance of Soviet foreign policy while at the same time sending a signal to the United States government that he wanted to improve Soviet–US relations.
Rise to power
After the death of Chernenko on 10 March 1985, Andrei Gromyko proposed Gorbachev as the next general secretary. And since Gromyko was a longstanding party member, his recommendation carried great weight among the Central Committee. Gorbachev expected much opposition to his nomination as general secretary, but ultimately the rest of the Politburo supported him. Shortly after Chernenko's death, on 11 March 1985, the Politburo unanimously elected Gorbachev as his successor. He thus became the eighth leader of the Soviet Union. Few in the government imagined that he would be as radical a reformer as he proved. Although he was not a well-known figure to the Soviet public, there was widespread relief that the new leader was not elderly and ailing. Gorbachev's first public appearance as leader was at Chernenko's Red Square funeral, held on 14 March. Two months after being elected, he left Moscow for the first time, traveling to Leningrad, where he spoke to assembled crowds. In June he traveled to Ukraine, in July to Belarus, and in September to Tyumen Oblast, urging party members in these areas to take more responsibility for fixing local problems.
Early years Gorbachev's leadership style differed from that of his predecessors. He would stop to talk to civilians on the street, forbade the display of his portrait at the 1985 Red Square holiday celebrations, and encouraged frank and open discussions at Politburo meetings. To the West, Gorbachev was seen as a more moderate and less threatening Soviet leader; some Western commentators however believed this an act to lull Western governments into a false sense of security. His wife was his closest adviser, and took on the unofficial role of a "first lady" by appearing with him on foreign trips; her public visibility was a breach of standard practice and generated resentment. His other close aides were Georgy Shakhnazarov and Anatoly Chernyaev.
Gorbachev was aware that the Politburo could remove him from office, and that he could not pursue more radical reform without a majority of supporters in the Politburo. He sought to remove several older members from the Politburo, encouraging Grigory Romanov, Nikolai Tikhonov, and Viktor Grishin into retirement. He promoted Gromyko to head of state, a largely ceremonial role with little influence, and moved his own ally, Eduard Shevardnadze, to Gromyko's former post in charge of foreign policy. Other allies whom he saw promoted were Yakovlev, Anatoly Lukyanov, and Vadim Medvedev. Another of those promoted by Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin, who was made a secretary of the Central Committee (26th term) in July 1985. Most of these appointees were from a new generation of well-educated officials who had been frustrated during the Brezhnev era. In his first year, 14 of the 23 heads of department in the secretariat were replaced. Doing so, Gorbachev secured dominance in the Politburo within a year, faster than either Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, or Brezhnev had achieved.
Domestic policy
Gorbachev recurrently employed the term perestroika, first used publicly in March 1984. He saw perestroika as encompassing a complex series of reforms to restructure society and the economy. He was concerned by the country's low productivity, poor work ethic, and inferior quality goods; like several economists, he feared this would lead to the country becoming a second-rate power. The first stage of Gorbachev's perestroika was uskoreniye ("acceleration"), a term he used regularly in the first two years of his leadership. The Soviet Union was behind the United States in many areas of production, but Gorbachev claimed that it would accelerate industrial output to match that of the US by 2000. The Five Year Plan of 1985–1990 was targeted to expand machine building by 50 to 100%. To boost agricultural productivity, he merged five ministries and a state committee into a single entity, Agroprom, although by late 1986 he acknowledged this merger as a failure.
The purpose of reform was to prop up the centrally planned economy—not to transition to market socialism. Speaking in late summer 1985 to the secretaries for economic affairs of the central committees of the East European communist parties, Gorbachev said: "Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism." Gorbachev's perestroika also entailed attempts to move away from technocratic management of the economy by increasingly involving the labor force in industrial production. He was of the view that once freed from the strong control of central planners, state-owned enterprises would act as market agents. Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders did not anticipate opposition to the perestroika reforms; according to their interpretation of Marxism, they believed that in a socialist society like the Soviet Union there would not be "antagonistic contradictions". However, there would come to be a public perception in the country that many bureaucrats were paying lip service to the reforms while trying to undermine them. He also initiated the concept of gospriyomka (state acceptance of production) during his time as leader, which represented quality control. In April 1986, he introduced an agrarian reform which linked salaries to output and allowed collective farms to sell 30% of their produce directly to shops or co-operatives rather than giving it all to the state for distribution. In a September 1986 speech, he embraced the idea of reintroducing market economics to the country alongside limited private enterprise, citing Lenin's New Economic Policy as a precedent; he nevertheless stressed that he did not regard this as a return to capitalism.