Mikhail Gorbachev

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 8 related

1. Story
2. General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from March 1985 and the last head of the Soviet state, whose choices are the proximate reason the confrontation ended without a war. Three of them matter most here. He accepted deep asymmetric cuts in arms control, agreeing at Reykjavik in 1986 to explore the elimination of whole categories of weapons and signing the INF Treaty in 1987, which removed far more Soviet than American missiles. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, completing it in 1989. And in 1989 he made clear that the Soviet Union would not use force to preserve communist governments in eastern Europe, which removed the guarantee on which those governments had rested since 1945 and is the immediate condition for what happened in Berlin that November. His domestic programme of perestroika and glasnost was intended to renew the Soviet system rather than end it, and the gap between that intention and the outcome is the central irony of the period.
3. Knowledge
4. Mikhail Gorbachev
5. Connections
6. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
7. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan
8. The Reykjavik summit
9. The INF Treaty is signed in Washington
10. The Berlin Wall opens
11. The attempted coup against Gorbachev
12. The Belavezha accords
13. The Soviet Union is formally dissolved
14. Evidence
15. Named as the general narrative authority behind this pack's framing of the period, and cited in the Journey's own declared references. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. It is also a work with a definite interpretive position — broadly, that Soviet conduct drove the confrontation and that Western pressure and Soviet internal failure ended it — and this pack cites it as one reading rather than as a neutral summary.
16. Supports the signature date, the 500–5,500 km range band, the elimination of an entire class of weapons and the on-site inspection regime. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; the number of missiles eliminated is deliberately not quoted anywhere in this pack.