Mikhail Gorbachev - Early Life

Early Life

Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Stavropol, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family of migrants from Voronezh and Chernigov Governorates. As a child, Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Gorbachev recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father." Both of his grandfathers were arrested on false charges in the 1930s; his paternal grandfather was sent to exile in Siberia.

His father was a combine harvester operator and World War II veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev. His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née Gopkalo), was a kolkhoz worker. In his teens, he operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence masters degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture. While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and soon became very active within the party.