Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union, serving as General Secretary from 1985 to 1991 and implementing key reforms such as glasnost and perestroika that contributed to the end of the Cold War. Born in 1931 in Stavropol, he rose through the Communist Party ranks and introduced significant political and economic changes, which eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After leaving office, he remained active in politics and global issues, criticizing post-Soviet leadership and advocating for democracy and environmental responsibility.

1. Leo R. Sandy

2.  He was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union,
having been General Secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991
 He was the country's head of state from 1988 until
1991 (titled as Chairman of the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, as Chairman of the
Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and as President of
the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991)
 Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai in 1931 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 he was at the university,
he joined the Communist Party, and soon became
very active within it

3.  In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of
the Stavropol Regional Committee, First Secretary to
the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a
candidate member of the Politburo in 1979
 Within three years of the death of Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief "interregna" of
Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected
general secretary by the Politburo in 1985
 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

4.  Gorbachev's policies of glasnost ("openness") and
perestroika ("restructuring") and his reorientation of
Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the
Cold War
 Under this program, the role of the Communist Party
in governing the state was removed from the
constitution, which inadvertently led to crisis-level
political instability with a surge of regional nationalist
and anti-communist activism culminating in the
dissolution of the Soviet Union
 Gorbachev later expressed regret for his failure to
save the USSR, though he has insisted that his
policies were not failures but rather were vitally
necessary reforms which were sabotaged and
exploited by opportunists

5.  He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989,
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, and the Harvey Prize
in 1992, as well as honorary doctorates from various
universities
 In September 2008, Gorbachev and business oligarch
Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the
Independent Democratic Party of Russia, and in May
2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was
imminent
 This was Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a
political party, having started the Social Democratic
Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social
Democrats in 2007

6.  Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye,
Stavropol Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, into a
mixed Russian-Ukrainian family[6] of migrants from
Voronezh and Chernigov Governorates
 As a child, Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine
of 1932–1933
 He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in
1933] nearly half the population of my native village,
Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters
and one brother of my father”
 Both of his grandfathers were arrested on false
charges in the 1930s; his paternal grandfather Andrey
Moiseyevich Gorbachev was sent to exile in Siberia

7.  His father was a combine harvester operator and Red
Army veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich
Gorbachev. According to Gorbachev, during World
War II his father "defended Kursk, forded the
Dnieper knee-deep in blood and was wounded in
Czechoslovakia
 His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née
Gopkalo), was a kolkhoz worker. He was brought up
mainly by his Ukrainian maternal grandparents. In
his teens, he became a leader in the Komsomol, a
Communist youth organization
 He operated combine harvesters on collective farms
and won the Red Labor Banner in 1949 for helping his
father break harvesting records

8.  In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via
a correspondence master's degree at the Stavropol
Institute of Agriculture
 Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko,
daughter of a Ukrainian railway engineer, at Moscow
State University. They married on 25 September 1953
and moved to Stavropol upon graduation
 She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina
Mikhailovna Virganskaya, in 1957
 Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999.
Gorbachev has two granddaughters (Ksenia and
Anastasia) and one great granddaughter
(Aleksandra)

9.  Gorbachev rose in the Communist League hierarchy
and worked his way up through territorial leagues of
the party. He was promoted to Head of the
Department of Party Organs in the Stavropol
Regional Committee in 1963
 In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the
Stavropol Regional Committee, a body of the CPSU,
becoming one of the youngest provincial party chiefs
in the nation
 In this position he helped reorganise the collective
farms, improve workers' living conditions, expand
the size of their private plots, and gave them a greater
voice in planning

10.  He was made a member of the Communist Party
Central Committee in 1971. Three years later, in 1974,
he was made a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the
Soviet Union and Chairman of the Standing
Commission on Youth Affairs
 He was subsequently appointed to the Central
Committee's Secretariat for Agriculture in 1978
 In 1979, Gorbachev was elected a candidate (non-
voting) member of the Politburo, the highest
authority in the country, and received full
membership in 1980
 Gorbachev became one of the Politburo's most visible
and active members

11.  Gorbachev's positions within the CPSU created more
opportunities to travel abroad, and this would
profoundly affect his political and social views in the
future as leader of the country
 Gorbachev was elected general secretary by the
Politburo on 11 March 1985. Upon his accession at
age 54, he was the youngest member of the Politburo
 Mikhail Gorbachev was the Party's first leader to
have been born after the Revolution. As de facto ruler
of the USSR, he tried to reform the stagnating Party
and the state economy by introducing glasnost
("openness"), perestroika ("restructuring"),
demokratizatsiya ("democratization"), and uskoreniye
("acceleration" of economic development), which
were launched at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in
February 1986

12.  Gorbachev's primary goal as general secretary was to
revive the Soviet economy after the stagnant
Brezhnev years. In 1985, he announced that the
economy was stalled and that reorganization was
needed
 He called for fast-paced technological modernization
and increased industrial and agricultural
productivity, and tried to reform the Soviet
bureaucracy to be more efficient and prosperous
 Gorbachev soon came to believe that fixing the Soviet
economy would be nearly impossible without
reforming the political and social structure of the
Communist nation

13.  He also initiated the concept of gospriyomka (state
acceptance of production) during his time as leader,
which represented quality control
 One of the first reforms Gorbachev introduced was
the anti-alcohol campaign, begun in May 1985, which
was designed to fight widespread alcoholism in the
Soviet Union
 Prices of vodka, wine, and beer were raised, and their
sales were restricted. It was pursued vigorously and
cut both alcohol sales and government revenue
 As a result, alcohol production migrated to the black
market economy and dealt a blow to state revenue—a
loss of approximately 100 billion rubles

14.  Gorbachev said: "Many of you see the solution to
your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in
place of direct planning. Some of you look at the
market as a lifesaver for your economies. But,
comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but
about the ship, and the ship is socialism”
 Perestroika (literally "restructuring" in Russian) was
proposed in an attempt to overcome the economic
stagnation by creating a dependable and effective
mechanism for accelerating economic and social
progress

15.  According to Gorbachev, perestroika was the
"conference of development of democracy, socialist
self-government, encouragement of initiative and
creative endeavor, improved order and discipline,
more glasnost, criticism and self-criticism in all
spheres of our society. It is utmost respect for the
individual and consideration for personal dignity”
 1988 would see Gorbachev's introduction of glasnost,
which gave the Soviet people freedoms that they had
never previously known, including greater freedom
of speech
 The press became far less controlled, and thousands
of political prisoners and many dissidents were
released

16.  In contrast to the controversy at home over his
domestic reforms, Gorbachev was largely hailed in
the West for his 'new thinking' in foreign affairs.
During his tenure, he sought to improve relations and
trade with the West by reducing Cold War tensions.
 He established close relationships with several
Western leaders, such as West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who
famously remarked, "I like Mr. Gorbachev; we can do
business together”
 Gorbachev proposed that the Soviets and Americans
both cut their nuclear arsenals in half (at the time
each had 30,000 nukes)

17.  On 11 October 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met at
Höfði house in Reykjavík, Iceland, to discuss
reducing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in
Europe. To the immense surprise of both men's
advisers, the two agreed in principle to removing INF
systems from Europe and to equal global limits of 100
INF missile warheads
 This would culminate in the signing of the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in
1987, after Gorbachev had proposed this elimination
on 22 July 1987 (and it was subsequently agreed on in
Geneva on 24 November)
 In February 1988, Gorbachev announced the full
withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan

18.  An estimated 14,453 Soviets were killed between 1979
and 1989 as a result of the Afghanistan War
 Also during 1988, Gorbachev announced that the
Soviet Union would abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine,
and allow the Eastern bloc nations to freely determine
their own internal affairs
 Moscow's abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine
allowed the rise of popular upheavals in Eastern
Europe throughout 1989, in which Communism was
overthrown
 Except in Romania, the popular upheavals against the
pro-Soviet regimes were all peaceful

19.  The loosening of Soviet hegemony over Eastern
Europe effectively ended the Cold War, and for this,
Gorbachev was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal
in Gold in 1989 and the Nobel Peace Prize on 15
October 1990
 On 9 November, people in East Germany (the
German Democratic Republic, GDR) were suddenly
allowed to cross through the Berlin Wall into West
Berlin, following a peaceful protest against the
country's dictatorial administration, including a
demonstration by some one million people in East
Berlin on 4 November

20.  Following his resignation and the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, Gorbachev remained active in Russian
politics. During the early years of the post-Soviet era,
he expressed criticism at the reforms carried out by
Russian president Boris Yeltsin
 Following a failed run for the presidency in 1996,
Gorbachev established the Social Democratic Party of
Russia, a union between several Russian social
democratic parties
 Since his resignation, Gorbachev has remained
involved in world affairs. He founded the Gorbachev
Foundation in 1992, headquartered in Moscow. He
later founded Green Cross International, with which
he was one of three major sponsors of the Earth
Charter

21.  He also became a member of the Club of Rome and
the Club of Madrid, an independent non-profit
organization composed of 81 democratic former
presidents and Prime Ministers from 57 different
countries
 In the decade that followed the Cold War, Gorbachev
opposed both the U.S.-led NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia in 1999 and the U.S.-led Iraq War in 2003
 On 27 July 2007, Gorbachev criticized U.S. foreign
policy: "What has followed are unilateral actions,
what has followed are wars, what has followed is
ignoring the UN Security Council, ignoring
international law and ignoring the will of the people,
even the American people", he said

22.  That same year, he visited New Orleans, a city hard-
hit by Hurricane Katrina, and promised he would
return in 2011 to personally lead a local revolution if
the U.S. government had not repaired the levees by
that time. He said that revolutionary action should be
a last resort
 In May 2008, The Telegraph (UK) published an article,
"Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War," which
quotes Gorbachev saying, "The Americans promised
that NATO wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of
Germany after the Cold War but now half of central
and eastern Europe are members, so what happened
to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted

23.  Gorbachev has become critical of both Putin and
Dmitry Medvedev since at least March 2011. His
main grievances about the "tandem" are backsliding
on democracy, corruption and the dominance of
security officers
 Gorbachev is also dissatisfied by the fact that he has
not been allowed to register his social democratic
party
 Gorbachev also stated that he believed that Putin
should not have sought a third term as the Russian
president in 2012
 In April 2013, Gorbachev decried Putin's retreat from
democracy, noting that in Russia "politics is
increasingly turning into imitation democracy" with
"all power in the hands of the executive branch"

24.  Gorbachev addressed Putin directly, stating that "to
go further on the path of tightening the screws,
having laws that limit the rights and freedoms of
people, attacking the news media and organisations
of civil society, is a destructive path with no future”
 In his lifetime, Gorbachev has received numerous
awards and decorations from Russia and foreign
countries including the Order of Lenin (Russia), the
Indira Gandhi Prize (India), and the Freedom Award
from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis,
Tennessee

25. Quotes
 I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the
cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred.
Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
Being at one with nature
 Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to
move millions of people. Since the very birth of
human civilization, people have moved to settle close
to it. People move when there is too little of it.
People move when there is too much of it. People
journey down it. People write, sing and dance about
it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere
and every day, need it

26. Quotes cont’d
 We need a new system of values, a system of the
organic unity between humankind and nature and the
ethic of global responsibility
 More socialism means more democracy, openness and
collectivism in everyday life
 The world will not accept dictatorship or domination
 We are all passengers aboard one ship, the Earth, and
we must not allow it to be wrecked. There will be no
second Noah's Ark
 The time has come to develop integrated global
policies

27. Video
 Biography: Mikhail Gorbachev

28. References
 Biography: Mikhail Gorbachev. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypV0UB
QoLoU
 Mikhail Gorbachev. Retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorb
achev