Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Mikhail was the man credited with helping end the Cold War was born into a peasant family on March 2, 1931, near Stavropol. He joined the Communist Party in 1952 and completed a law degree at Moscow University the following year. He came to the attention of Politburo members Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, who got him elected to the Central Committee in 1971 and arranged foreign trips for their rising star. In 1978 he was back in Moscow, and the next year he was chosen as a candidate member of the Politburo. Gorbachev lost the political initiative. This now belonged to the leaders of the various Soviet republics, in particular the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. At the end of the year, Gorbachev was forced to resign as president of a Soviet Union no longer in existence. Since that time, he has been blamed by many Russians for their current political and economic predicament. In the West, he remains the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped end the Cold War.

The Collapse of Communism

The first factor which contributed to the failure and eventual collapse of
communism was the fact that the Communist party's domination was
illegitimate from the beginning,communism never had popular public support from the start. The second factor is that communism never really had the support of the people there were constant social parties that were opposite communism.