Mikhail Gorbachev

person · earth

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.

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