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 by the increasingly problematic question of nationalities and the dramatic fragmentation of the Eastern Bloc. Despite unprecedented international détente, due to Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan completed in January and continuing talks between Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, domestic reforms suffered from increasing divergence between reformists, who wanted faster change, and conservatives, who wanted to limit change. Gorbachev states that he tried to find middle ground between both groups, but this would draw more criticism towards him. The story from this point on moves away from reforms and becomes one of the nationalities question and the eventual dissolution of the