Few people in modern political history have won such lifetime fame and at the same time suffered such sharp attacks and ridicule as a man with the simple Russian name Gorbachev - "Gorbi", as he was somewhat familiarly, but with obvious sympathy, nicknamed in the West.
This person has enough titles and awards, his biographies in different languages occupy a whole shelf, and over time, no doubt, more than one feature film will be shot about him - the zigzags of his political career are too contradictory. Not a single decision he made during his years in power was unambiguous, be it an anti-alcohol legislative decision or the
withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. He held a wide variety of posts, but if you choose the most "exclusive" one, it sounds like this: The First President of the USSR. The uniqueness of this post is that it existed for a very short time, less than two years, and then sunk into history together with the state itself, the Soviet Union.
The first President of the USSR was elected in March 1990 at the third (I note, extraordinary!) Congress of People's Deputies, which at that time served as the supreme body of state power. In the USSR, a political post called the "president of the country" had never existed before. In this regard, it is interesting to recall that the hierarchy of the Soviet state was very different from the generally accepted system in the world, this created a lot of sensitive issues in diplomatic communication. Who, for example, should I congratulate on the occasion of the main national holiday?
Throughout the world, the president of a state writes to the president of another country, the prime minister writes to his colleague, but what about the
Soviet Union? It is clear that the most influential person in the USSR is not at all the chairman of the Council of Ministers, but the Secretary General of the
CPSU Central Committee, but this is a party, not a state post ...
With a stretch of the president of the country could be called the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, that is, the head of the highest legislative body of the Soviet state. The first President of the USSR, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, held this position until his election to the post, which now allowed him to consider even his most uncompromising anti-communist, for example, the President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan.
It is M. Gorbachev and R. Reagan who are considered the creators of the new world order, which forever ended the era of the
Cold War. The surname of the last President of the USSR did not leave the pages of the most respectable newspapers and magazines, praising him as a politician who managed to make our planet more secure for living. The Nobel Peace Prize is the strongest evidence of recognition of the merits of M. Gorbachev in this field.
However, the first, he is the last President of the USSR in his country, often received completely different epithets - such as a destroyer, a traitor, a defiler and others. Something in these accusations may be true, but for the most part - still not. In any case, the last word will remain with History, but for now, the name of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev alone still acts on some not too smart people as a very strong irritant.
But he has long been accustomed to this and does not pay attention to the floods of accusations and outright slander - that’s why he and Mikhail Gorbachev, the first President of the USSR of their kind!