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Historical person
1931–2022
Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and introduced the policies of perestroika and glasnost in an effort to reform a stagnating system. He reduced censorship, negotiated major arms agreements and declined to use large-scale force to preserve communist governments in eastern Europe. Reform also released political and national pressures that the central government could not control. The failed August 1991 coup accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ended his presidency.
Gorbachev is still more common in memoir, political thriller and alternate history than as the central character of established historical novels. Fiction about the final Cold War often uses him as the reforming leader whose decisions make rapid change possible but cannot determine its outcome. Portrayals vary between courageous peacemaker, failed reformer and inadvertent destroyer of the Soviet state.
Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity places Mikhail Gorbachev within a narrative shaped by political ambition and government and crime, espionage and covert power.
Series
The Mike Martin novels follow an Arabic-speaking British SAS and intelligence officer whose Iraqi childhood enables him to operate under identities unavailable to most Western agents. Fist of God places Major Martin inside occupied Kuwait and Baghdad during the 1990–91 Gulf crisis, while The Afghan returns to him…
All books in this series
The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families from Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States from the years before the First World War to the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. Across three generations, miners, aristocrats, diplomats, political organisers, soldiers and journalists experience public events through marriages, rivalries…
All books in this series
