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
Yuri Gorbachev is not the first time Yuri Gorbachev has worked with Stolichnaya. In 1994, “Stolichnaya” commissioned Gorbachev to design their annual Christmas “Holiday” advertisement, which appeared in hundreds of magazines around the world including Art & Antiques, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, American Photo, W, GQ, Elle among others. It was so successful that every year for the next four years he was commissioned to do a new image for the Holiday ad. Michel Roux, art collector and President of Carillon Importers, Inc. (distributor of Absolut and Stolichnaya vodka) was the person behind the creative advertising of Stolichnaya and Absolut. He used