Mikhail Gorbachev Life And Quotations 2014

Gorbachev has always seemed to me to be the most statesmanlike and honorable leader of Russia of the years during which I have been watching the news, in other words from 1952 and following. In 1957 a student newspaper that was circulated in my school came into my hands. The article that caught my attention was about Sputnik. I remember going out that night with my sister and father as we looked for that blinking light in the sky, and we found it! I was joyful at the seemingly miraculous nature of the achievement, as I had never considered space travel to be a realistic goal for the US. Others were not of that persuasion, though, and the Space Race was on. It wasn't long before President Kennedy had promised that the US would land a man on the moon within ten years. Those were exciting times to live through. It's an often told joke that "May you live in interesting times," is an old Chinese curse, but I have been overjoyed to live in interesting times. I have always since I can remember been looking for fascinating things to learn, and to this day I have found no end to the supply. This article on Gorbachev is very "interesting." I hope you enjoy it.



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Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes:


We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

Change, Nature, End
More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Life, Means, Democracy
Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

War, Simply, Present
A society should never become like a pond with stagnant water, without movement. That's the most important thing.
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

Society, Water, Movement
If not me, who? And if not now, when?
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Accept, Domination
America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Society, Teacher, Living
I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Goal, Fantasy, Communist
Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can't resolve the problem of women's pantyhose. There's no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Life, Work, Women
What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Peace, Star, Wars
It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Plans, Argue, Mutual
The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Socialism, Came, Capitalism
Sometimes it's difficult to accept, to recognise one's own mistakes, but one must do it. I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Mistakes, Difficult, Accept
Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Life, Jesus, Mankind
It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Work, Today, Past
If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

Today, Looks, Yesterday
Sometimes when you stand face to face with someone, you cannot see his face.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Cannot, Face, Stand
The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

Democracy, Soviet
I say again that I am an atheist. I do not believe in God.
Mikhail Gorbachev


God, Again, Atheist
If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Blame, British, Museum
Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.
Mikhail Gorbachev


War, Less, Serious
Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Life, Cannot, Public
I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.
Mikhail Gorbachev


Paid, Price, Heavy
Surely, God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement in relations between the two great nations on earth.
Mikhail Gorbachev
 

Wisdom, Great, God
Ex-Presidents of the United States get state subsidies. Not so in Russia. You get no government support.
Mikhail Gorbachev

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Mikhail Gorbachev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв, tr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov; IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil sʲɪrˈɡʲejɪvʲɪt͡ɕ ɡərbɐˈt͡ɕɵf] ( listen); born 2 March 1931) is a formerSoviet statesman. He was the seventh and last leader of the Soviet Union, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the country's head of state from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991 (titled as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and as President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991). He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born after the October Revolution.

Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasantUkrainian–Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief "interregna" of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in Western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.

Gorbachev's policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika("restructuring") as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, removed the constitutional role of the Communist Party in governing the state, and inadvertently led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and the Harvey Prize in 1992 as well as Honorary Doctorates from various universities as discussed below.

In September 2008, Gorbachev and business oligarch Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia,[1] and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent.[2] This was Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a political party, having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social Democrats in 2007.[3]

Early and personal life

Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Stavropol, Russian SFSR,Soviet Union, into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family[4] of migrants from Voronezh and Chernigov Governorates. As a child, Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in 1933] nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father."[5] Both of his grandfathers were arrested on false charges in the 1930s; his paternal grandfather Andrey Moiseyevich Gorbachev (Андрей Моисеевич Горбачев) was sent to exile in Siberia.[6][7]

His father was a combine harvester operator and World War II veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev. His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née Gopkalo), was a kolkhoz worker.[7] In his teens, he operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence masters degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture. While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and soon became very active within the party.

Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya (Ири́на Миха́йловна Вирга́нская), in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999.[8] Gorbachev has two granddaughters (Ksenia and Anastasia) and one great granddaughter (Aleksandra).



For a lengthy history of how the USSR became the Russia of today, see this article on the Internet and continue reading.