Mikhail Gorbachev

📍Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, Russia

“I was born Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, the son of peasant farmers who had survived both collectivisation and the German occupation. I rose through the Communist Party to become General Secretary in 1985 at fifty-four — the youngest man to lead the Soviet Union since Stalin. I introduced glasnost and perestroika, believing the Soviet system could be reformed from within. I was wrong — or right, depending on how you look at it. The system could not be reformed; it could only be ended. I ended it. The Cold War concluded without a nuclear exchange. Stavropol, the peasant village, the collective farm childhood — these were the beginning of a life that reshaped the world.”

Sources: Gorbachev, M. Memoirs (1995, translated Georges Peronansky and Tatjana Varsavsky), Doubleday; Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor (1996), Oxford University Press