Mikhail sergeyevich Gorbachev (born on March 2, 1931) is a political figure in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union and served as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. From 1988 to 1991, he was the head of state of the country (appointed president of the presidium of the Supreme Court) and served as Soviet from 1988 to 1989, President of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991.

Gorbachev was born in 1931 to a peasant family in Stavropol, Ukraine, and he ran a combine on a collective farm as a teenager. He graduated from Moscow State University with a law degree in 1955. During his university years, he joined the Communist Party and soon became very active in it. In 1970, he was appointed first Secretary of the Party committee of Stavropol District Committee, first Secretary of the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and alternate member of the Political Bureau in 1979. Within three years after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was a brief "interregna" of Andropov and Chernenko, elected as secretary general by the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in 1985. Before he took the post, he was occasionally mentioned in Western newspapers as the next leader and the most senior young generation.

Gorbachev's Glasnost and reform policies and his reorientation of the Soviet strategic objectives contributed to the end of the cold war. Under the plan, the role of the Communist Party in the governance of the country was removed from the constitution, which inadvertently led to crisis level political turmoil, accompanied by the surge of regional nationalism and anti Communist radicalism, and finally led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev later expressed regret for failing to save the Soviet state, although he insisted that his policy was not a failure, but a crucial reform, destroyed and used by opportunists. He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, the Harvey prize in 1992 and the honorary doctorates of various universities.