Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was the first president of the Soviet Union, serving from 1990 to 1991. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for contributing to the break-up of the USSR.

Mikhail Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Russia. In 1961, he became a delegate to the Communist Party Congress. He was elected general secretary in 1985. He became the first president of the Soviet Union in 1990, and won the Nobel Prize for Peace that same year. He resigned in 1991, and has since founded the Gorbachev Foundation and remains active in social and political causes.

Early Life

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian family in the village of Privolnoye, in the Krasnogvardeisky District near the Stavropol Territory of southern Russia.

Gorbachev’s parents were peasants. His father, Sergei, operated a combine harvester for a living. Sergei was drafted into the Russian Army when the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941. Three years later, he was wounded in action and returned home to resume operating farm machinery. Sergei passed on his experience with a combine harvester to his young son, Mikhail. Mikhail Gorbachev was a quick learner and showed an aptitude for mechanics.

As a teenager, Gorbachev contributed to the family’s income by driving tractors at a local machine station. So hard a worker was he that, by the age of 17, Gorbachev was the youngest ever to win the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for his active role in bringing in that year’s bumper crop. Gorbachev’s mother, Maria, exemplified this tireless work ethic with her lifelong toil on a collective farm.

The political climate during Mikhail Gorbachev’s upbringing was turbulent. In the 1930s, when Gorbachev was still very young, he suffered the trauma of seeing his maternal grandfather, Pantelei Gopkalo, arrested during the Great Purge. Gopkalo was accused of being a Trotskyite counterrevolutionary and was imprisoned and tortured for 14 months. To his family’s great relief, he was spared execution.

The economic climate during Mikhail Gorbachev’s childhood was also one of turmoil. In 1933, southern Russia endured a major drought. Since the region depended on farming for both food and income, its residents suffered from famine, and many died of starvation.

As a child, Gorbachev had a passion for learning. When he graduated from high school with a silver medal in 1950, his father persuaded him to continue on to university. Gorbachev’s academic record was stellar, and he was accepted into Moscow University, the premier school in the Soviet Union, without having to take the entrance exam. The university even provided him with free living accommodations at a nearby hostel. Gorbachev graduated from Moscow University cum laude with a law degree in 1955 and shortly afterward returned to his hometown with his new wife, Raisa, a fellow Moscow University alumnus.

Early Political Involvement

Gorbachev had become a candidate member of the Communist party while he was in high school, but it wasn’t until 1952, when he was at Moscow University, that he was granted full membership.

Once back in Stavropol after graduation, Gorbachev took a position at the Stavropol territorial prosecutor’s office. Soon after he began the job, Gorbachev ran into some old acquaintances. They remembered him from his involvement in the Young Communist League during high school. Because Gorbachev had shown himself to be dedicated and organized, they asked him to be the assistant director of propaganda for the territorial committee of the local Communist youth league. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had died two years prior, and the Soviet Union’s process of political restructuring created an exciting climate for young Communist Party activists. Eager to get involved, Gorbachev accepted the offer and resigned his position at the prosecutor’s office after just 10 days on the job.

Gorbachev steadily rose through the ranks of the Communist league. In 1956, he was made first secretary of the Stavropol City Komsomol Committee. In 1961, he was appointed as a delegate to the party congress. Throughout the 1960s, Gorbachev continued to advance his political position and increase his knowledge of agriculture and economics, eventually becoming the regional agricultural administrator and party leader.

In 1980, Gorbachev made a critical advancement in his burgeoning political career when he became a full member of the Politburo, otherwise known as the Political Bureau of the Central Agency, the executive committee for numerous Communist Party factions.