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David E. Hoffman: Why Gorbachev?

[David E. Hoffman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy.]

On Mikhail Gorbachev’s 80th birthday, he is deservedly being praised for glasnost, perestroika and the end of the Cold War. All have earned their place in the history books. But here’s a question: why did it happen that Gorbachev, and not someone else, was selected on a night in March, 1985 to be the new Soviet leader?...

Gorbachev was hardly a radical in his earlier years. He witnessed the horrors of World War II as a child, and later saw the shortcomings of the Soviet state, from the persecution of his grandfathers during Stalin’s day to the economic stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev realized, too, that the outsized military-industrial complex sucked much of the oxygen out of the system, leaving average people to live in misery. Still, Gorbachev kept many of these observations to himself as he climbed the ladder to power....

Gorbachev was not chosen because of the United States, or Ronald Reagan, or Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, as some have suggested. The Cold War was a major factor in all that ailed the Soviet Union, but not the main reason Gorbachev was selected.

Rather, Gorbachev was chosen because he was a shining light in a dusky hall. Five of the ten voting members of the Politburo that day were over seventy, three in their sixties and only two in their fifties. Not only was Gorbachev, at 54, the youngest member of the Politburo by a full five years, he was thirteen years younger than the average age of the voting membership....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy