Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаил Сергеевич Горбачёв Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov [mʲɪxɐˈil sʲɪrˈɡʲeɪəvʲɪtɕ ɡərbɐˈtɕof] ( listen); born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its collapse in 1991.

He was the only Soviet leader to have been born after the October Revolution of 1917. In 1989, he became the first Soviet leader to visit China since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s.

Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian-Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While at university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Already before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.

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