Mikhail Gorbachev

Born in 1931 to peasants in the North Caucasus, Gorbachev grew up under Stalin, drove combine harvesters on a collective farm, then climbed the Party ladder through law school at Moscow State and posts in Stavropol, where he oversaw canal construction and became first party secretary in 1970. By 1985, after three Soviet leaders died in quick succession, the Politburo made him general secretary. Convinced reform was the only way to preserve the system, he withdrew from Afghanistan, held summits with Reagan to wind down the nuclear standoff, and launched glasnost and perestroika to decentralize the economy and open the press. His democratization fractured the one-party state; when Warsaw Pact nations broke away in 1989, he let them go. He resigned, founded the Gorbachev Foundation, and spent three decades criticizing Yeltsin and Putin while the world debated whether he had freed a region or merely presided over collapse.