“Gorbachev. His Life and Times" is a biography of the last Soviet leader, written by the famous American historian and political scientist, Pulitzer Prize winner William Taubman. This book is based not only on work with a huge corpus of memoirs, published documents and archival sources both in Russia and abroad, but also on the author’s personal conversations with Mikhail Gorbachev, his colleagues, associates, and friends. Painstakingly reconstructing his biography from the moment of his birth in a Stavropol village to becoming the last president of the USSR, Taubman tries to answer several questions at once. How did Gorbachev decide to go against the system that raised him and in which he believed so much, did he have a specific plan for political and economic reforms, and why did he fail to save the Soviet Union from collapse?