Mikhail Gorbachev

By: Rachel Weaver 

Mikhail Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931 in Russia.  The general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union in 1990–91. His efforts to democratize his country’s political system and decentralize its economy led to the downfall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In part because he ended the Soviet Union’s postwar domination of Eastern Europe, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990.