Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader
On this day · 11 March 1985
A day after Chernenko died, the Politburo handed its youngest member the keys to a superpower that would not outlive him in office.
On 11 March 1985, less than 24 hours after Konstantin Chernenko’s death, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union elected Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary. At 54, he was the youngest member of the leadership and the first Soviet chief born after the 1917 revolution.
Foreign minister Andrei Gromyko put his name forward, and the recommendation carried decisive weight. The vote was effectively settled the day before, when Gorbachev was named to head Chernenko’s funeral commission, a traditional signal of succession.
He inherited a stagnating economy and a costly war in Afghanistan, and chose reform over preservation.
Gorbachev’s twin programs, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), loosened censorship and the command economy. They also unleashed forces he could not contain. Within six years the Soviet Union dissolved, and Gorbachev resigned the presidency in December 1991, leaving the office he had won that March without a country to lead.
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