Mihail Gorbaciov

The most important historical event from the last forty years was definitely the disintegrating of the Soviet Union and the collapsing of the communism. The movement – that has been mincing to envelop the whole world for decades – has disintegrated itself with an amazing velocity, and now it seems to be heading to the ‘garbage can of the history’. There is one central figure that marks this stunning decline: Mihail Gorbaciov, the man that led the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1991.

Gorbaciov was born in 1931, in the village of Privolnoe, from the region of Stavropol, in the south of Russia. His childhood coincides with the bloodiest period of the dictatorship exerted by Iosif Stalin. Mihail’s own grandfather, Andrei, spent nine years in Stalin’s concentration camps and was not released until 1941, a few months before Germany invaded Russia. Mihail was too young to fight in the Second World War, but his father was enrolled, and his older brother died in the battle. The German occupation lasted almost eight years in the village of Privolnoe.

However, nothing was a hindrance to Gorbaciov’s career. He used to have excellent results at school; at fifteen he enlisted himself in the Komsomol (the Union of the Communist Youth) and afterwards he worked on a combine-harvester in agriculture for four years. In 1950 he entered the State University in Moscow, where he studied Law School and got his diploma in 1955. In 1952, during college years, Mihail became a member of the Communist Party and met his future wife, Raisa Maximova Titorenko. They got married immediately after Gorbaciov got his diploma and had only one girl, Irina.

After graduating, Gorbaciov came back to Stavropol and began his gradual ascension through the Communist Party. In 1970he became the Prime-Secretary of the regional party committee, and in the following year he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He got promoted in 1978, when he moved to Moscow, as a secretary of the...