Biography of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
In his award-winning 1996 biography of Mikhail Gorbachev titled The Gorbachev Factor, Archie Brown provides the context for Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 and states emphatically that no one in the USSR expected major change from Gorbachev's rule. They underestimated him. It was under his leadership that the USSR came to an end, making him its last head of state. He is also credited with ending the Cold War. Moreover, Gorbachev came to be identified with "new thinking" and suddenly found himself the darling of Western culture while being disliked in his own country (Brown 5).
Brown takes the reader through the various components of Gorbachev's rule, examining his foreign policy, his political approach, and his economic leadership and highlighting Soviet events as examples of Gorbachev's handling of issues. Its main theses are that Gorbachev had a positive influence on Soviet history and, more specifically, that "the Gorbachev Factor"-Gorbachev's role as a wild card that actually transformed the Soviet political system from communism to more of a democratic socialism-is what has made the difference in the Soviet Union's evolution to a nation that was more like nations of the West. Brown presents these theses serially, addressing each in its own right before examining the impact of all.
The organization of the book is clear and systematic. Brown devotes separate chapters to each of the reforms Gorbachev accomplished, such as the economic and the political, and he shows the progressive development and cumulative effect of these changes so that the reader can follow them. The argument of the book is logical, and Brown substantiates each of his assertions with ample evidence from the historical record.
The author does have obvious prejudices, however. He is somewhat enamored of Gorbachev as a leader, and he tends to overemphasize Gorbachev's s...