Mikhail Gorbachev Nikita Khrushchev. He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, in which position he oversaw construction of the Great Stavropol Canal. In 1974 he moved to Moscow to become First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet and in 1979 became a candidate member of the Politburo. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief "interregna" of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected general secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and to its socialist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform was necessary
Mikhail Gorbachev had worked together to seize the TV tower in Vilnius; Gorbachev asked the heads of the KGB and military if they had approved such action, and there is no evidence that they, or Gorbachev, ever did. Gorbachev cites documents found in the RSFSR Prokuratura after the August coup, which only mentioned that "some 'authorities'" had sanctioned the actions. The book "Alpha – the KGB's Top Secret Unit" also suggests that a "KGB operation co-ordinated with the military" was undertaken by the KGB Alpha Group. Archie Brown, in "The Gorbachev Factor", uses the memoirs of many people around Gorbachev and in