49 Fun Facts About Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev holds what place in Soviet history?

Its last leader. He took over in 1985 meaning to reform the Soviet system, not to end it; six years later he resigned as president of a country that had ceased to exist.

Which Western leader, after meeting Gorbachev in 1984, declared that they could 'do business together'?

Margaret Thatcher, the fierce anti-communist a Soviet journalist had dubbed the Iron Lady, told the BBC 'I like Mr Gorbachev' three months before he took power.

As a teenager Gorbachev spent his summers operating what on a collective farm?

A combine harvester. He worked the harvests beside his father and, still a teenager, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for it, which probably helped win him his university place.

What did Gorbachev study at Moscow State University, graduating in 1955?

Law. A close friend on the course was a Czech student, Zdeněk Mlynář, who went on to be one of the brains behind the 1968 Prague Spring, the reform movement that Soviet tanks crushed.

Gorbachev married Raisa Titarenko in 1953, months after which Soviet leader's death?

Stalin. Both of Gorbachev's grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s, yet he joined the crowds that queued to see the dictator lying in state.

In which southern Russian region did Gorbachev spend his early career, becoming first party secretary in 1970?

Stavropol. Running the region brought him to the notice of two Kremlin heavyweights with ties to it, Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, and their backing carried him to Moscow in 1978.

Gorbachev became general secretary in March 1985 after the death of which short-lived leader?

Konstantin Chernenko was the third ailing leader to die in under three years, after Brezhnev and Andropov; the Politburo finally turned to its youngest member, who was 54.

Which religious leader did Gorbachev visit in December 1989, promising Soviet believers greater freedom of worship?

Pope John Paul II. The Soviet leader called on the Polish pope at the Vatican, and the two agreed to open diplomatic ties between Moscow and the Holy See.

What does the Russian word 'perestroika' literally mean?

Restructuring. Gorbachev meant to repair the socialist economy, not to swap it for a free market, yet the half-reforms he set in motion ended by bringing the whole system down.

What does 'glasnost' mean?

Openness. Censorship was lifted, the press began to write about Stalin's purges, the Gulag, crime and corruption, and the blanks in official Soviet history started to be filled in.

Which dissident did Gorbachev telephone in December 1986 to end almost seven years of exile in the closed city of Gorky?

Andrei Sakharov, the physicist behind the Soviet hydrogen bomb, had been banished in 1980 for his protests. Freed by that call, he was elected to the new Soviet parliament three years later.

Gorbachev's 1988 Law on Cooperatives allowed Soviet citizens to do what for the first time since the 1920s?

Own private businesses. Cafés, workshops and traders sprang up under the cooperative label, the first legal private enterprise since Lenin's New Economic Policy was shut down in 1928.

The 1986 explosion at which nuclear plant, and its cover-up, became a catalyst for glasnost?

Chernobyl. Moscow kept silent for two days, until radiation alarms at monitoring stations in Sweden forced it to admit to the world that a reactor had blown up.

Where did Gorbachev and Reagan hold their October 1986 summit that nearly abolished ballistic missiles?

Reykjavík. The talks broke down at the last minute with nothing signed, yet the ground gained there became, little more than a year later, a treaty scrapping a whole class of nuclear missiles.

Which US programme did Gorbachev insist be confined to the laboratory, sinking his 1986 arms deal with Reagan?

The Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, was Reagan's plan for a shield against nuclear missiles. It was never built: in 1993 the United States dropped the plan in favour of defences against shorter-range missiles.

In which city did Reagan and Gorbachev sign the INF Treaty on 8 December 1987?

Washington. At the signing Reagan brought out his favourite Russian proverb, 'trust, but verify'; 'You repeat that at every meeting,' Gorbachev shot back, and the room laughed.

Which US president quit Gorbachev and Reagan's INF Treaty, accusing Russia of violations?

Donald Trump announced the pull-out in 2018 and the treaty died the next year. It had been the first to destroy a whole class of nuclear missiles, with each side's inspectors watching on the spot.

Reagan's 1987 challenge 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' was delivered at which Berlin landmark?

The Brandenburg Gate stood just behind the Wall. The State Department and the National Security Council both tried to cut the line from the draft as too provocative; Reagan insisted it stay in.

Gorbachev withdrew the Red Army from which nine-year war?

The war in Afghanistan. The pull-out ended on 15 February 1989, when the commander, General Boris Gromov, walked back across the border bridge into Soviet territory behind the last of his troops.

Gorbachev's policy of letting Eastern Bloc states go their own way was jokingly named after which singer?

Frank Sinatra. A Soviet spokesman joked on American television that Moscow now had the Sinatra Doctrine: like the singer of 'My Way', every Eastern Bloc country could do it its own way.

Student protests upstaged Gorbachev's May 1989 summit in which communist capital, the first such visit in 30 years?

Beijing. Protesters filled Tiananmen Square, so his welcome ceremony had to be moved to the airport, and the foreign press that had come for the summit stayed to report the uprising.

Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush held their storm-tossed December 1989 summit aboard ships off which island?

Malta. A winter gale made the sea so rough that the leaders could not meet aboard the two navies' warships as planned, and the talks shifted to a Soviet cruise liner tied up in harbour.

After an earthquake in which Soviet republic did Gorbachev ask America for aid in 1988, the first such request in 40 years?

Armenia. The quake killed at least 25,000 people around the town of Spitak; Gorbachev broke off a visit to New York to fly home, and Western rescue teams were let in.

Which West German chancellor pushed for rapid reunification against Gorbachev's wish for a gradual process?

Helmut Kohl. Less than three weeks after the Wall opened he announced a ten-point plan for unity; within a year Germany was one country inside NATO, and Gorbachev had gone along with it.

In January 1991 Soviet troops stormed the television tower in which capital, killing unarmed civilians?

Vilnius. The raid killed 14 people but failed to reverse the independence Lithuania had declared in March 1990.

Where was Gorbachev on holiday when hardliners launched their coup in August 1991?

A dacha at Foros, Crimea. The plotters cut his phone lines, flew in to demand that he hand over power and, when he refused, told the country he was too ill to govern.

Which vice president was named as acting leader by the August 1991 coup plotters?

Gennady Yanayev declared himself acting president, but when he faced the cameras at the plotters' press conference his hands shook visibly as he claimed Gorbachev was merely resting.

Who climbed onto a tank to defy the 1991 coup against Gorbachev?

Yeltsin, elected Russia's president two months earlier, denounced the takeover from the top of the tank. The plotters had failed to arrest him, the army split, and the coup collapsed in three days.

In 1987 a West German teenager landed a light plane beside which landmark, giving Gorbachev grounds to sack his defence minister?

Red Square. Mathias Rust, 18, flew a rented Cessna from Helsinki straight through Soviet air defences and set it down by the Kremlin; Gorbachev used the fiasco to clear out generals who opposed his reforms.

Gorbachev abandoned which doctrine, named after a predecessor, that had justified invading Czechoslovakia in 1968?

The Brezhnev Doctrine held that Moscow could send troops into any ally that strayed from the socialist path. When Eastern Europe's regimes fell in 1989, Gorbachev left the tanks in their barracks.

Leaders of which three republics signed the Belavezha Accords of 8 December 1991, declaring the USSR dead?

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Their leaders met at a hunting lodge in a Belarusian forest near the Polish border and pronounced the Soviet Union dead without its president in the room.

What organisation did the Belavezha Accords create to succeed the Soviet Union?

The Commonwealth of Independent States. Eight more republics signed up at Alma-Ata within two weeks, which left Gorbachev president of a country with nothing to govern; he resigned four days later.

Which republic's 1 December 1991 independence vote did Gorbachev see as the fatal blow to the Union?

Ukraine. More than nine in ten voters chose independence; Gorbachev was shocked by the scale of it, and within a month the Soviet Union had been dissolved.

What replaced the Soviet flag over the Kremlin on the evening Gorbachev resigned, 25 December 1991?

The Russian tricolour. The red hammer-and-sickle flag came down over the Kremlin minutes after his televised farewell, and the Soviet Union was formally voted out of existence the next day.

Weeks before the 1991 coup, Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signed which treaty cutting long-range nuclear arsenals?

START I was the product of nine years of talks and ordered real cuts in long-range missiles and bombers. Five months after the signing, one of the two countries that signed it no longer existed.

Which honour did Gorbachev win in 1990 for his leading role in the radical changes in East-West relations?

The Nobel Peace Prize. He stayed away from the Oslo ceremony that December, and he gave his Nobel lecture only the following June, under three months before the coup.

Which magazine named Gorbachev its 'Man of the Decade' for the 1980s?

Time. At the turn of 1990, instead of naming a person of the year for 1989, the magazine gave him the whole decade, much as it had once given Winston Churchill the half-century.

Gorbachev finished seventh in the 1996 Russian presidential race with roughly what vote share?

0.5%. The man who had ended the Cold War won about 386,000 votes after a campaign in which he was shut out of state television and struck by a man in the crowd at a stop in Omsk.

Gorbachev shared a Grammy with Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren for a recording of what?

Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. Loren told the old tale, Clinton read a new sequel in which Peter's grandson catches a wolf and sets it free, and Gorbachev spoke the introduction in Russian.

Gorbachev famously appeared in a late-1990s television commercial for which company?

Pizza Hut. In the advert a Moscow family argues over his legacy until the mother points out that, thanks to him, they have Pizza Hut; he said he took the fee to fund his foundation.

Raisa Gorbacheva died in 1999 of which illness, after treatment in Münster, Germany?

Leukemia. As Soviet first lady she had been patron of a charity fighting the same disease in children; in 2022 Gorbachev was buried beside her.

Where is Gorbachev buried, beside his wife?

Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. So many people came to file past his coffin that the viewing was extended, but he was given only parts of a state funeral, and President Putin stayed away, citing his schedule.

Which German director sat down with the ageing Gorbachev for the 2018 documentary 'Meeting Gorbachev'?

Werner Herzog filmed three long conversations with him over six months, and the film closes with Gorbachev reciting a Lermontov poem about walking out alone onto the road.

Gorbachev paid for the first computers of which independent Russian newspaper, founded in 1993?

Novaya Gazeta became Russia's best-known investigative paper and paid for it: several of its reporters, among them Anna Politkovskaya, were murdered, and it suspended publication in 2022.

Which Gorbachev foreign minister resigned in 1990 warning 'a dictatorship is coming'?

Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian who had helped Gorbachev wind down the Cold War, quit in protest at the hardliners' growing power. He later went home to lead independent Georgia for a decade.

Gorbachev's first big campaign, launched two months after he took power in 1985, restricted the sale of what?

Alcohol. Vodka prices rose, shops could sell drink for only a few hours a day and vineyards were torn up, but sugar sales soared as people distilled their own, and the campaign was abandoned.

After visiting St Francis's tomb in 2008, Gorbachev clarified his religious position as what?

Atheist. Newspapers had reported that he prayed at the tomb in Assisi as a secret Christian; he answered that he had been and remained an atheist, though he was baptised as a baby.

Which radical 1990 blueprint for a Soviet market economy did Gorbachev first back and then abandon?

The 500 Days programme would have sold off state property and freed prices in under two years. Gorbachev seemed ready to sign up, then let his prime minister talk him out of it.

Which environmental organisation did Gorbachev launch in 1993?

Green Cross International. He wanted a body that would do for environmental disasters what the Red Cross does for medical ones, and delegates at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit urged him to set it up.