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Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (born 2 March 1931) was the seventh and last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991.

He was the only Soviet leader to have been born after the October Revolution of 1917. In 1989, he became the first and only Soviet leader to visit China since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s.

Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian-Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While at university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it.

In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Already before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.

Gorbachev's attempts at reform as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, ended the political supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

In September 2008 Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia together, and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent. This was Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a political party, after having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social-Democrats in 2007.