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) to admit that there were economic "shortcomings" and acknowledged the ongoing "food problem". Other topics for discussion were the need to save energy resources and to improve the quality of Soviet produced goods. By the 1980s the Soviet economy had stagnated, with the natural gas industry the only Soviet fuel industry to surpass the five-year plan's indicators. Although 40,000 robots were produced during the plan, advances in computer technology decreased, due to growing disillusionment with the Soviet system. At the end of his life, former Premier Alexei Kosygin feared the complete failure of this five-year plan, claiming that the incumbent