Mikhail Gorbachev (Greater Cold War)

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, (Russian: Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв; born March 2, 1931) is a Soviet politician who previously served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union before becoming the first President of the Soviet Union from March 15, 1990 to May 7, 1991 and was the de-facto head of state of the Soviet Union from 1988 until 1998.

Gorbachev was born in 1931 in Stavropol Krai to a Ukrainian-Russian peasant family where he operated combine harvests on collective farms in his teens. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While in university, Gorbachev had joined the Communist Party in 1950 and became an active member in the party. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a candidate member of the Politburo in 1979. Gorbachev was later elected General Secretary in 1985 following the death of Leonid Brezhnev and the brief "interregna" of Andropov and Chernenko.

Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union had gone under a series of radical reforms that greatly transformed and reorganized the entire political structure of the USSR. These reforms, glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring"), the Soviet Union was reorganized into an open political entity with more sovereignty given to its republics and the political monopoly of the communist party was ended by the end of 1980s. Following the referendum in 1991, Gorbachev had ratified the New Union Treaty which reorganized the USSR and helped keep the union together as well as officially end the Cold War by 1991, though tensions did persist.

Thought out the 1990s, Gorbachev focused on growing the Soviet economy through new reforms of decentralization and allowing limited forms of capitalism leading to a mixed-market economy by 1993. Living standards rose and unemployment had fallen leading to the "Roaring Nineties" in the USSR. Outside the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was forced to deal with a series of conflicts that halted decreasing tensions with the western powers from the Transnistria War in 1992 to the Georgia Separatist Crisis in August of the same year.

Gorbachev resigned in 1998 after serving eight years in office and was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin that same year. Post-presidency, Gorbachev had worked towards helping increase the standard of living and social conditions of the Soviet Union and work hard towards solving global issues and ending remaining tensions from the Cold War.