Mikhail Gorbachev speaking at the CPSU congress.
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-) - Soviet politician and leader. He was born in the Caucasus in a peasant family. He worked as a mechanic, and in the early 1950s he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He started his career at the central level only in the seventies. Secretary General of the Central Committee since 1985 and thus de facto leader of the state.
He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, thus ending the compromising conflict unleashed by Leonid Brezhnev. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for activities leading to the end of the so-called cold war. He was the first and only president of the Soviet Union. He held this office in 1990-1991. He is considered to be one of the most meritorious people for the fall of communism and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact.
Mikhail Gorbachev was marginalized as a result of the August coup, also known as the Janjew coup (1991), and real control over the state was taken over by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev officially resigned. A day later, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.
The following year, Mikhail Gorbachev set up a foundation in his name to do research on politics. He ran for the presidential election in 1996 without success and tried to create his own major political party. Recently, especially after 2014 and Russia's annexation of Crimea, he began to express opinions that were more and more favorable to Vladimir Putin.