A comprehensive biography of the final leader of the Soviet Union chronicles Gorbachev's rise from peasant to politician and describes how his liberal policies ended the Cold War and unintentionally provoked the breakup of the USSR. "When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism....