Gorbachev: His Life and Times William Taubman When Michail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies o perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping form a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's grave-digger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagen, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays then many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand". Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts ands documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and advisers, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel. William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.