William Taubman on Gorbachev: His Life and Times

This is a production by the National History Center in cooperation with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program in Washington, DC.
In his Gorbachev biography, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy turned into the Soviet system’s gravedigger, why the Communist regime allowed him to destroy it, why Gorbachev’s dream of democratizing the USSR foundered, how he and President Ronald Reagan turned out to be almost perfect partners, and why Gorbachev permitted Eastern Europe to abandon Communism without firing a shot. Taubman’s talk will emphasize the impact of Gorbachev’s personality on his policies and his fate. Svetlana Savranskaya and Michael Dobbs will comment.
William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, is the author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2004 and the National Book Critics Circle award in 2003. He chairs the Academic Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Center, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2009.