Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Stavropol, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family of migrants from Voronezh and Chernigov Governorates. As a child, Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. He recalled in a memoir that “In that terrible year in 1933 nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father. Both of his grandfathers were arrested on false charges in the 1930’s his paternal grandfather was sent to exile in Siberia.
His father was a combine harvester operator and World War II veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev. His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva , was a kolkhoz worker. In his teens, he operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence masters degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture. While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and soon became very active within the party.
Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya, in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999. Gorbachev has two granddaughters Ksenia and Anastasia and one great granddaughter Aleksandra.
Ended the political supremacy of the Communist Party, and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. After surviving an attempted coup from conservative Communists who feared he was going too far, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary on Christmas Day 1991. He currently runs the Independent Democratic Party, which he founded with billionaire Alexandar Lebedev and continues to advocate for private ownership and non-violent resolutions of conflict. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which he manages with diet, exercise, and medications.