Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman

By the time I met Mikhail Gorbachev, he had already changed the world. In March, 1993, I was home from a three-year stint as Moscow-based correspondent for Maclean’s. Gorbachev was 27 months removed from his six years as leader of the Soviet Union, and from the USSR’s dissolution. I interviewed him during a stop in Calgary for a book promotion. He was jet-lagged and impatient, but still managed his famously long answers to questions. It was a mundane setting for the man who instituted the greatest peaceful revolution of the 20th century.

Today, Gorbachev, 86, is alternately revered or forgotten in the West, and ignored or reviled in his homeland. As William Taubman notes in his masterful biography, Gorbachev: His Life and Times, those are among many paradoxes. “Gorbachev,” Taubman writes, “was a visionary who changed his country and the world—though neither as much as he wished.” He gave his country freedom of speech and democratic elections but at the price of his own power. He set out to overhaul the economy and structure of the country for which he despaired but loved—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. His policies led to its end. Tough, self-confident and willful enough to rule a superpower, he was principled, wise and compassionate in his refusal to take violent steps that could have kept him in power—and the USSR together. [MORE]