Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was a Russian-Soviet politician and statesman whose six-year service as the seventh and final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union across 1985–1991 — producing his late-1980s glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") reform programs and his subsequent 1990 Nobel Peace Prize award — made him one of the defining 20th-century world leaders. He was born Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, into a Russian-Ukrainian peasant farming family. His father Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev was a Stavropol Krai combine-harvester operator and World War II Red Army veteran, and his mother Maria Panteleyevna Gopkalo was a homemaker.

His education at Moscow State University (Bachelor of Laws, 1955) launched his early-career path. His 1955–1985 30-year Communist Party of the Soviet Union service — across his Stavropol Krai Komsomol-Communist-Party-Youth-Branch leadership across 1955–1962, his Stavropol Krai First Secretary leadership across 1970–1978, his Politburo-of-the-Communist-Party-of-the-Soviet-Union membership beginning October 1980 — produced his late-1970s and early-1980s national-political profile.

His March 11, 1985 election as the seventh General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — at age 54, the youngest CPSU General Secretary in 60 years — launched his 1985–1991 Soviet-leadership career. His 1986 launch of his domestic-reform programs glasnost ("openness") — producing 1986 and 1987 launch of widespread Soviet press freedom and 1988 release of multiple Soviet political prisoners — and perestroika ("restructuring") — producing 1987 and 1988 transition from Soviet command-economy economic-administration system toward a partial market-mechanism economic-administration system — launched his late-1980s Soviet domestic-reform program.

His 1985–1989 international-summit-and-arms-control negotiations with U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush — across the 1985 Geneva Summit, the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, the 1987 Washington Summit (which produced the December 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty), and the 1988 Moscow Summit — produced the 1989–1991 conclusion of the Cold War. The November 9, 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent 1989 Eastern Bloc revolutions across Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the December 26, 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union produced his late-20th-century world-leader public profile. He died on August 30, 2022, at age 91, in Moscow, of severe and prolonged illness.

His name Mikhail derives from the Russian form of Michael (from the Hebrew Mikha'el meaning "who is like God?"). Mikhail has been climbing in American naming since the 1990s.