Here are key dates in the life of ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
– March 2, 1931: He is born into a peasant family in the village of Privolnoye in the southern Stavropol region.
– 1946: Starts working as an operator of a combine harvester on a collective farm.
– 1952: Joins the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made up of several socialist republics.
– 1953: Marries Raisa Titarenko whom he met at university while studying law. They will have a daughter, Irina, in 1957. Raisa dies in 1999 from leukaemia.
– 1985-1991: He leads the Soviet Union as general secretary of the Communist Party and as president when the post is introduced in 1990.
– October 1985: Presents a modernising economic reform plan known as perestroika.
– 1987: He and the US president, Ronald Reagan, sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty on slashing their nuclear arsenals, ending a superpower build-up of warheads.
– 1988-1989: Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan, defeated after a 10-year campaign.
– 1990: Gorbachev is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for reforms leading to the end of the Cold War between Eastern and Western blocs.
– August 1991: Hardline communists carry out a failed coup while Gorbachev is on holiday in Crimea. A series of Soviet republics begin declaring independence.
– December 1991: After the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine conclude that the Soviet Union no longer exists and sign accords for its dissolution, Gorbachev resigns.
– 1996: He stands as an independent in presidential polls but takes only 0.5 percent, Boris Yeltsin winning the election.
bur/ach
© Agence France-Presse