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After Germany was defeated, Gorbachev's parents had their second son, Aleksandr, in 1947; he and Mikhail would be their only children. The village school was closed during much of the war but re-opened in autumn 1944. Gorbachev did not want to return but when he did he excelled academically.
Aug 31, 2022 · While working as a busy doctor, Virganskaya-Gorbacheva and her first husband had two daughters, who would go on to make a name for themselves as Moscow socialites in the early 2000s (via The New York Times ). Her work-family balancing act mimicked her father's in many ways.
Aug 31, 2022 · The heir apparent had two daughters, Anastasia and Ksenia, with a husband whom she divorced, per the Daily Mail. According to the German National Library, Virganskaya went to school to...
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- Early life
- General secretary of the CPSU: perestroika to the fall of the Soviet Union
Mikhail Gorbachev was a Soviet politician. Gorbachev served as the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985–91) as well as the last president of the Soviet Union (1990–91). Both as general secretary and as president, Gorbachev supported democratic reforms. He enacted policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”), and he pushed for disarmament and demilitarization in eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s policies ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990–91.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Learn more about this Russian political party.
collapse of the Soviet Union
Read about the sequence of events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
How did Mikhail Gorbachev become president of the Soviet Union?
Gorbachev was the son of Russian peasants in Stavropol territory (kray) in southwestern Russia. He joined the Komsomol (Young Communist League) in 1946 and drove a combine harvester at a state farm in Stavropol for the next four years. He proved a promising Komsomol member, and in 1952 he entered the law school of Moscow State University and became...
Gorbachev was named a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1971, and he was appointed a party secretary of agriculture in 1978. He became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 and a full member in 1980. He owed a great deal of his steady rise in the party to the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, the leading party ideologue. Over the course of Yury Andropov’s 15-month tenure (1982–84) as general secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev became one of the Politburo’s most highly active and visible members; and, after Andropov died and Konstantin Chernenko became general secretary in February 1984, Gorbachev became a likely successor to the latter. Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, and the following day the Politburo elected Gorbachev general secretary of the CPSU. Upon his accession, he was still the youngest member of the Politburo.
Gorbachev quickly set about consolidating his personal power in the Soviet leadership. His primary domestic goal was to resuscitate the stagnant Soviet economy after its years of drift and low growth during Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure in power (1964–82). To this end, he called for rapid technological modernization and increased worker productivity, and he tried to make the cumbersome Soviet bureaucracy more efficient and responsive.
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When these superficial changes failed to yield tangible results, Gorbachev in 1987–88 proceeded to initiate deeper reforms of the Soviet economic and political system. Under his new policy of glasnost (“openness”), a major cultural thaw took place: freedoms of expression and of information were significantly expanded; the press and broadcasting were allowed unprecedented candour in their reportage and criticism; and the country’s legacy of Stalinist totalitarian rule was eventually completely repudiated by the government. Under Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (“restructuring”), the first modest attempts to democratize the Soviet political system were undertaken; multicandidate contests and the secret ballot were introduced in some elections to party and government posts. Under perestroika, some limited free-market mechanisms also began to be introduced into the Soviet economy, but even these modest economic reforms encountered serious resistance from party and government bureaucrats who were unwilling to relinquish their control over the nation’s economic life.
In foreign affairs, Gorbachev from the beginning cultivated warmer relations and trade with the developed nations of both West and East. In December 1987 he signed an agreement with U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan for their two countries to destroy all existing stocks of intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles. In 1988–89 he oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan after their nine-year occupation of that country.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Apr 5, 2011 · 'Novaya Gazeta' spoke to Irina Virganskaya-Gorbacheva, daughter of the first president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, on the eve of his 80th birthday. Source: Itar-Tass. Follow Russia Beyond on...
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She was the eldest of three children of Maxim Andreyevich Titarenko, a railway engineer from Chernihiv in Ukraine, and his Siberian wife, Alexandra Petrovna Porada, from Veseloyarsk. She spent her childhood in the Ural Mountains, and met her future husband while studying philosophy in Moscow.
Aug 30, 2022 · She now serves as vice president of Gorbachev’s foundation, and has two children of her own. After 2011, Gorbachev suffered declining health and underwent several operations. In 2015, he...
