William Taubman

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989 he had transformed Soviet Communism. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in December 1991 he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the USSR. In this first comprehensive biography of Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy turned into the Soviet system's grave digger, why the Communist regime allowed him to destroy it, how Gorbachev's dream of democratizing Russia through perestroika and glasnost foundered, and why he permitted Eastern Europe to abandon Communism without conflict. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, Russian archives, interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries as well as with foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait also extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved. Nuanced and poignant yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has the amplitude of a Tolstoy novel.

His Life and Times

Gorbachev

Nico J

Gorbachev is an extraordinary man, and William Taubman bestowed total justice upon him in this biography and very clearly dedicated himself to doing this thoroughly, with detail, in a sweeping tale. Armed with my low to non-existent knowledge of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe / North Asia in general, my aim was to learn more a prominent key figure in their history and branch out from there. Reflective of my usual process with non-fiction, I like to take something large and use colored flags to mark pages and topics to drill down further. My heritage is Polish, and I know startlingly little of it except as described in broad chapters in past history classes. While at college, East Asia was the focus of my interests and now that I've really created a mould of that, I'm adventuring into other areas of history of which I'm woefully ignorant.

I'm truly impressed by Gorbachev on paper - to go from being a peasant in a country that's so difficult to wrap my head around culturally and feels incredibly far removed, to the idea that people would run at his car, wave, scream his name and cheer for him. He seemed to be loved more abroad by people who weren't part of the Soviet Union than his own people; granted, they seemed like a hard, prickly, skeptical people which was valid considering what they had gone through. I've learned more about the structure of the Soviet Union and how it works. My impression is that the personalities and demeanors can be inscrutable, difficult to read. Anecdotally, my family's always had that issue, too. I reflected on how a culture and cause you to carry this baggage that's completely invisible but still manages to sit on your back - I draw a connection to the immense historical and complicated weight of East and Central Asia and the wars among them. The Soviet Union's history was iron and they were born of it, and it took understand that to follow the skepticism and vitriol that Gorbachev receives as he stares at a point beyond the crowds and horizon. I think great leaders and figures in history, whether they fell on the "good" or "bad" moral side of it, can see something magnificent far beyond us, something visionary, almost. Those are the type of people that are complicated and can't be discerned easily, and end up changing things drastically for better or worse.

He's intelligent; he's also egotistical. Again, powerful figures in history tend to have a certain sureness of themselves that's necessary to stomach those hard things. To push through the levels of the Party without precisely giving away how much he wanted everything to change. If you want to do something different, you'll have to do something you've never done. It seems like he also inherited a bit of a mess and that decisions weren't made in any type of vacuum but rather, there are a ton of tiny strings that were spread in a web, interfering with his relationships and decisions and also putting strain on his time in office - Germany, the rest of the Soviet Union and their calls for independence, the United States, a looming cat in the corner. I was impressed by the compromise of Gorbachev when in negotiations with U.S. leaders, because the Russia we have today is a different beast than the Soviet Union of that time. Many books only skim the Cold War and offer a one-sided perspective of our country's feelings at the time. The depth of the relationships with Reagan, then Bush for a time, and the First Ladies (Raisa being powerful in her own right and sphere), it's all so fascinating. How does a normal man carve out his own vision against the backdrop of the Soviet Union and in the shadow of Lenin? The transition from Soviet Union to Russia is also something that's fuzzy to me, but some clarity was provided in this book. 

Taubman doesn't hide or soften any blows to Gorbachev's character. There were missteps, and he made sure to couch that in context of his personality as well as the bigger goal he was trying to reach with his reign. I think he didn't know how to take the reigns of Eastern Europe and the other Soviet actors, since he didn't want to use the blood and force that had characterized other periods of time; still, was there a right way to bring that to heel? He tried so hard to meet at the table instead of using violence, but the part of the world that did seem to get away from him was Eastern Europe while we was working on his relationships with the West. It's hard to understand from my perspective why his own people loathed and pitied him in that way so much. It felt complicated and truthfully, I felt bad for him.

The last few chapters are brutal in that they're hard to stomach. By now, Gorbachev is a sometimes-misguided, affable, decent leader who is trying to pull the Soviet Union inch by inch into the future. The coup broke me reading it. I'm no stranger to coups in history, but the idea that you've grown to like this person and the people that laughed and drank with him, drafted the future of policy with him, participated (maybe they were lying) in his vision with him - ! They surround your family with the threat of giving it all up because no one wants you messing with it anymore. It's tragic. If he were violent, it would be understandable - a tyrant on the loose. This feels like watching awkwardly in the corner. After they return to Moscow it all seems to tumble down from there, especially for his wife. There's a line by her, close to the time she's passing away, and she says something about having to die to be understood. For many great people in history, she's hit it on the nose. 

His principles are admirable and ultimately may have been part of his downfall. He didn't forcibly remove his enemies, and he didn't use any violence crackdowns to reel in angry movements. The lines between maintaining control at any cost or letting a populace make its own mistakes is uncomfortable. Foreign policy illustrates the same questions at many painful flashpoints in history? Do we let them fall or do we send our own people in? Who are we supporting and who can we trust? Is it our business to be involved? I don't think any of those choices are easy and the men and women that have to make them are just as jaded, fallible, blinded, and faulty as we are in our daily lives. That's fairly terrifying.

He's one of the most fascinating people I've ever read about, and though I don't think he fully accomplished the vision he wanted, he's an amazingly vivid and important historical figure that's been wonderful to learn about. Really kicked off a fascination with the Soviet Union's history and political parties, and the history of all the country satellites around it. This reminded me that history is more of a drama than most fiction, and it tends to be remembered, reinforced, and defined by the winner, which is something we should resist.

Gorbachev His Life and Times

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