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 the superiority of socialist over bourgeois democracy". Gorbachev had remained close to his parents; after his father he became terminally ill in 1974, Gorbachev travelled to be with him in Privolnoe shortly before his death. His daughter, Irina, married fellow student Anatoly Virgansky in April 1978. In November 1974, Gorbachev was appointed as a Secretary of the Central Committee; he was the youngest man to ever hold such a position. His appointment had been approved unanimously by the Central Committee's members. To fill this position, Gorbachev and his wife moved to Moscow, where they were initially given an old dacha