Mikhail Gorbachev - Rise in The Communist Party

Rise in The Communist Party

Gorbachev attended the important twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, where Nikita Khrushchev announced a plan to surpass the U.S. in per capita production within twenty years. At this point in his life, Gorbachev would rise in the Communist League hierarchy and worked his way up through territorial leagues of the party. He was promoted to Head of the Department of Party Organs in the Stavropol Agricultural Kraikom in 1963.

In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, a body of the CPSU, becoming one of the youngest provincial party chiefs in the nation. In this position he helped reorganise the collective farms, improve workers' living conditions, expand the size of their private plots, and gave them a greater voice in planning.

He was soon made a member of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1971. Three years later, in 1974, he was made a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs. He was subsequently appointed to the Central Committee's Secretariat for Agriculture in 1978, replacing Fyodor Kulakov, who had supported Gorbachev's appointment, after Kulakov died of a heart attack. In 1979, Gorbachev was promoted to the Politburo, the highest authority in the country, and received full membership in 1980. Gorbachev owed his steady rise to power to the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, the powerful chief ideologist of the CPSU.

During Yuri Andropov's tenure as General Secretary (1982–1984), Gorbachev became one of the Politburo's most visible and active members. With responsibility over personnel, working together with Andropov, 20 percent of the top echelon of government ministers and regional governors were replaced, often with younger men. During this time Grigory Romanov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Yegor Ligachev were elevated, the latter two working closely with Gorbachev, Ryzhkov on economics, Ligachev on personnel.

Gorbachev's positions within the CPSU created more opportunities to travel abroad, and this would profoundly affect his political and social views in the future as leader of the country. In 1972, he headed a Soviet delegation to Belgium, and three years later he led a delegation to West Germany; in 1983 he headed a delegation to Canada to meet with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of the Commons and Senate. In 1984, he travelled to the United Kingdom, where he met British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Upon Andropov's death in 1984, the aged Konstantin Chernenko took power; after his death the following year, it became clear to the party hierarchy that younger leadership was needed. Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on 11 March 1985, only three hours after Chernenko's death. Upon his accession at age 54, he was the youngest member of the Politburo.