Russian Nobel Laureates: Mikhail Gorbachev, Ivan Pavlov, Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Zhores Alferov, Lev Landau

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 61. Chapters: Mikhail Gorbachev, Ivan Pavlov, Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Zhores Alferov, Lev Landau, Igor Tamm, Alexander Prokhorov, lie Metchnikoff, Ivan Bunin, Joseph Brodsky, Wassily Leontief, Mikhail Sholokhov, Vitaly Ginzburg, Leonid Kantorovich, Konstantin Novoselov, Pyotr Kapitsa, Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov, Nikolay Semyonov, Ilya Frank, Pavel Cherenkov, Nikolay Basov. Excerpt: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: , tr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov, IPA: born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991. He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born during the Communist rule. Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian-Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Already before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level. Gorbachev's attempts at reform as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet...