Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev[a] 

(born 2 March 1931) is a Russian and former Soviet

politician. The eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, he was the General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. He was also the country's head of
state from 1988 until 1991, serving as the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from
1988 to 1989, chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and president of the Soviet
Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, he initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism although by
the early 1990s had moved toward social democracy.
Of mixed Russian and Ukrainian heritage, Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, to
a poor peasant family. Growing up under the rule of Joseph Stalin, in his youth he
operated combine harvesters on a collective farm before joining the Communist Party, which then
governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state according to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. While
studying at Moscow State University, he married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953 prior to
receiving his law degree in 1955. Moving to Stavropol, he worked for the Komsomol youth
organization and, after Stalin's death, became a keen proponent of the de-Stalinization reforms
of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol
Regional Committee in 1970, in which position he oversaw construction of the Great Stavropol
Canal. In 1978 he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central
Committee and in 1979 joined its governing Politburo. Within three years of the death of Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief regimes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko,
the Politburo elected Gorbachev as General Secretary, the de facto head of government, in
1985.
Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and to its socialist ideals, Gorbachev
believed significant reform was necessary, particularly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. He
withdrew from the Soviet–Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States
President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and end the Cold War. Domestically, his policy
of glasnost ("openness") allowed for enhanced freedom of speech and press, while
his perestroika ("restructuring") sought to decentralize economic decision making to improve
efficiency. His democratization measures and formation of the elected Congress of People's
Deputies undermined the one-party state. Gorbachev declined to intervene militarily when
various Eastern Bloc countries abandoned Marxist-Leninist governance in 1989–90. Internally,
growing nationalist sentiment threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading Marxist-Leninist
hardliners to launch the unsuccessful August Coup against Gorbachev in 1991. In the wake of
this, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes and he resigned. After leaving
office, he launched his Gorbachev Foundation, became a vocal critic of Russian Presidents Boris
Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and campaigned for Russia's social-democratic movement.
Widely considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century,
Gorbachev remains the subject of controversy. The recipient of a wide range of awards—
including the Nobel Peace Prize—he was widely praised for his pivotal role in ending the Cold
War, curtailing human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist–
Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the reunification of Germany. Conversely,
in Russia he is often derided for not stopping the Soviet collapse, an event which brought a
decline in Russia's global influence and precipitated an economic crisis.