Gorbachev

The comprehensive biography of the transformative world leader by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev. When Mikhail Gorbachev took over the leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985, it was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet communism and won radical enemies on both the right and left. By 1990, he had ended the Cold War more than anyone else, and in 1991, after narrowly escaping a coup attempt, he unwittingly presided over the collapse of the very Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the last Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the gravedigger of the Soviet regime, how he climbed to the top of a system designed to keep his likes at the bottom, how he found common ground with the ultraconservative US president Ronald Reagan, and how he allowed the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire to disintegrate without using force to preserve them. Throughout the book, Taubman depicts the many facets of Gorbachev's unique personality, which, by Gorbachev's own admission, makes him "difficult to understand." Was he a truly great leader, or did he ultimately decline due to his own flaws, as well as to the inexorable forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal account extends to Gorbachev's extraordinary marriage to a woman he loved deeply and the family they raised together. This comprehensive account, rich in detail and moving, yet at the same time honest and truthful, has all the breadth of a great Russian novel.