When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985,
the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal
policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet
Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By
1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991,
after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided
over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first
comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman
shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he
clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down,
how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president
Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European
empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout,
Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by
Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in
fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own
shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?
Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents
from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and
adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal
portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply
loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and
poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the
amplitude of a great Russian novel.
