Lenin and Gorbachev both held power for seven years. Both confronted extraordinary political and economic dislocation. Neither came to power with a plan. In difficult moments, Gorbachev turned to Lenin’s writings, finding reassurance in the fact that the great revolutionary had also wrestled with doubts. Most Soviet leaders merely paid formulaic obeisance to Lenin, dutifully reciting the quotations speechwriters inserted into their orations. Gorbachev read Lenin’s collected works – all fifty-five volumes. He compared himself to Lenin as he made difficult choices in fraught circumstances. In the end, however, Gorbachev proved utterly different from Lenin. He rejected violence. He refused to risk large-scale turmoil. He was too cautious to be ‘heroic’.

William Taubman takes a deeply sympathetic approach to assessing Gorbachev’s successes and failures. Shelves groan under biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Putin. So toxic is Gorbachev’s name in Russia that this is the first full-scale biography of Gorbachev in any language, including Russian. It is, like Taubman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Khrushchev (2003), a stunning achievement, packed with lively and engrossing stories chronicled on the basis of extensive research. After 2004, when Taubman first conceived of writing the book, he interviewed Gorbachev eight times. He visited Stavropol, the agricultural region in the northern Caucasus where Gorbachev was born and made his initial career as a party official. He interviewed dozens of Gorbachev’s former associates. Because access to archival records is still limited, Taubman leans on Gorbachev’s own writings and recollections and those of his aide and admirer, Anatoly Chernyaev, who kept a diary throughout the years in power. Gorbachev diligently recounts the charges of critics, but almost always sides with the defence.

Taubman carefully reconstructs Gorbachev’s childhood in a mostly loving peasant family. As a boy he worked hard on the collective farm and in school. An excellent school record and the prize he won working a combine harvester helped secure his admission to the élite Moscow State University’s law school. (Ten years later, Taubman himself would enrol there as an American exchange student, writing on a research topic nearly identical to the one Gorbachev had chosen for his thesis.) A striking feature of Gorbachev’s character was his thirst for knowledge. He and his wife, Raisa, read voluminously and widely, including literature not available to ordinary Soviets. As he rose through the ranks as a provincial party official, and even when he arrived at the top of the party hierarchy in Moscow, he prided himself on being more ‘cultured’ than his rough-hewn communist peers, a difference that proved alienating.

How did this enlightened ex-peasant become the leader of the USSR, and once there, why did he embark on dramatic, and fatal, reforms? Three geriatric leaders died in quick succession in the early 1980s: Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. In 1985 the Politburo had little choice but to turn to a younger generation. Gorbachev, known as a hard-working, knowledgeable, and sometimes charming party stalwart, initially seemed an inspired choice. The public responded with hope to the energetic young progressive in the Kremlin, and, as Taubman reminds us, Gorbachev was the most popular political figure in the USSR until 1990.

His ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy gradually won him thunderous applause in the West. Whenever he needed an ego boost, he went abroad, to be thronged by adoring crowds and meet with leaders like Margaret Thatcher whom he considered more allies than adversaries. (Years after leaving office, in May 1999 he and Raisa came to Australia, where he had just been voted ‘the man of the twentieth century’. The visit was bittersweet: the ‘long and difficult’ flights may have exacerbated Raisa’s illness. She died of leukemia later that year, leaving Gorbachev devastated.)

At home he was confronted with festering problems: a failing war in Afghanistan, economic stagnation, declining oil prices, social ills like rampant alcoholism, and an agricultural sector in crisis. His own experience on a collective farm had laid the seeds of doubt about communism: he had seen first-hand that farmers had no incentive to produce. Coveted visits to Western Europe in the 1970s, where the freedoms he saw struck him even more than the material abundance, chipped away at his convictions. Yet he toed the party line to advance his career, keeping his doubts to himself, and as the head of the Soviet Communist Party he spoke and acted like a believer. According to Taubman, Gorbachev gave up on communism in favour of social democracy only around 1989, and then only in private.

Gorbachev’s move to glasnost (openness) in the political realm opened the floodgates to debate, but without being matched by market reforms. Perestroika (restructuring) was too piecemeal to affect the lumbering Soviet economy except to make it more chaotic. On any given day in 1990, only twenty-three of 211 basic foods could be found in state-run stores. Yet even in the face of unrelenting decline, Gorbachev waited five years to hire an economic adviser. To this day many Russians see poverty and lawlessness as the major outcomes of his rule. Meanwhile, the constituent nationalities of the Soviet empire grew restive, and Gorbachev’s attempt to appease them provoked party hard-liners into an ill-fated coup attempt in August 1991. After its failure, Gorbachev waited to repudiate the Communist Party, frittering away his credibility. When the core of the remaining Soviet republics withdrew from the union (the Baltic republics having seceded already), Gorbachev was left with nothing to rule. On 25 December 1991 he handed his Kremlin offices, and the nuclear codes, to the mercurial and bombastic Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian Republic. The Soviet flag was lowered and a superpower disappeared.

Taubman suggests that Gorbachev deserves admiration and pity. He struggled with overwhelming forces, doing his best work when he stepped aside to let those forces flow where they would, as when he blessed Eastern Europe’s independence. Russian historians of the future may blame Lenin and Stalin for creating an untenable system more than they condemn Gorbachev for presiding over its inevitable end. And, they may recognise that heroism is made not only of the ‘great’ but also of the ‘good’.