Gorbachev Becomes General Secretary

MAR 11 1985 · 12:00

Mikhail Gorbachev, newly elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, 1985. Place: Politburo meeting, the Kremlin, Moscow Figures: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, age 54 · Andrei Gromyko, Foreign Minister (who delivers the nominating speech) · Yegor Ligachev (rival, then deputy) · Eduard Shevardnadze, future Foreign Minister · Alexander Yakovlev, future architect of glasnost Four Funerals and a Politburo Vote Leonid Brezhnev dies on 10 November 1982 after eighteen years in power. Yuri Andropov succeeds and dies fifteen months later, on 9 February 1984. Konstantin Chernenko, already terminally ill at his selection, dies on 10 March 1985 after thirteen months. The Politburo meets the following morning. Andrei Gromyko, the most senior figure present and Foreign Minister since 1957, delivers the nominating speech for Gorbachev: This man has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth. The vote is unanimous. Gorbachev, age 54, is the youngest Politburo member and the first general secretary born after the October Revolution. He inherits a Soviet economy growing at zero in real terms, a war in Afghanistan in its sixth year that has killed roughly 25,000 Soviet soldiers without securing the Kabul government, an arms race that is consuming 15 to 25 percent of GDP (the upper estimates are credible), and a system of permanent shortages that the satellite populations no longer take seriously. He has six years. Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Decision Not to Shoot Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) are introduced at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February–March 1986 and formalized at the January 1987 Plenum. The Reykjavik summit with Reagan in October 1986 nearly produces an agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons; the INF Treaty (December 1987) eliminates an entire class of intermediate-range missiles. The withdrawal from Afghanistan begins May 1988 and completes February 1989. The unilateral conventional-forces reductions announced at the UN on 7 December 1988 amount to 500,000 troops and 10,000 tanks from Eastern Europe. The decisive moment is what Gorbachev does not do. When Solidarity wins the partly-free Polish elections of 4 June 1989, when Hungary opens its border with Austria on 11 September 1989, when crowds gather in East German cities through October, when the Berlin Wall opens on the night of 9 November 1989 because the East German leadership cannot get a clear instruction from Moscow, the instruction that does not come is the order to use force. Brezhnev had ordered it in 1968 in Prague; Khrushchev in 1956 in Budapest. Gorbachev does not. The Soviet Union dissolves on 25 December 1991 into fifteen sove Video: Gorbachev's election as General Secretary of the CPSU on 11 March 1985, the day after Chernenko's death. At fifty-four he is the youngest member of the Politburo.