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
Eleventh five-year plan (Soviet Union) leadership were reluctant to reform the stagnant Soviet economy. None of the Soviet Far East oblasts fulfilled the five-year plan's housing targets. By the 1960s, the goal of increasing the labour surplus had become a major obstacle, caused by factors including the declining birth rate. Labour growth had also stagnated with working population growth remaining at 18 percent between 1971 and 1980. The table below uses the planner's targets as a base for comparison with actual increases in industrial growth due to labour productivity. According to Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Soviet Premier at the 27th Party Congress, the Eleventh Five-Year Plan