Question: What year did Mikhail Gorbachev become General Secretary?
About the article "Cold War", section "Gorbachev reforms".

Candidate passages:
While he supported German reunification, Mitterrand was reluctant to take action because Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev warned it would lead to a military coup d'état in the Soviet Union.
Mitterrand did speak in favour of reunification in July 1989. 
Mlynář’s past caught up with him when Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Soviet Union’s Communist party.
Mlynář had become a close friend of Gorbachev’s during his stint as a student in Moscow in the 1950s.
It just so happened that he was the only person in the West to be personally acquainted with Gorbachev, who at the time was regarded with suspicion as an unknown Soviet party head.
The friendship between the two resulted in a great deal of media attention for Mlynář, as well as a personal invitation to Washington.
Following his rise to power, Gorbachev cut off relations with Czechoslovakia and in November 1989 the Husák regime collapsed as a result of the Velvet Revolution.
During the protests, several moderate elements in the StB, the Czechoslovak secret police, hoped to overthrow their masters and bring Mlynář back from exile to institute reforms.
However, Mlynář had long since renounced Communism, and wanted nothing to do with the plot.
His wife, Rita Klimova, was one of the leaders of Civic Forum, serving as the group's spokeswoman.
After the collapse of Communism, Mlynář saw opportunity to return home to Prague and continue the work that had been violently interrupted in 1968 with the events of the Prague Spring.
Mlynář would encounter great disappointment when he finally discovered that his countrymen, or at least those who came to power, did not share in his aspirations for Czechoslovakia's future.
The new era begun in 1989/1990 saw a call for pure capitalism; voices like Mlynář’s, calling for a more humanistic socialism, were silenced in the mass media.
Individuals who had derived great personal benefit from the Husák regime were now displacing anticommunist dissidents of the former regime and were condemning reformers for what they considered to be their lack of moral judgment. 
On November 19, 1985, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time, in Geneva, to hold talks on international diplomatic relations and the arms race.
The meeting was held at Maison de Saussure, a chateau owned by His Highness the Aga Khan.
Gorbachev later said "We viewed the Geneva meeting realistically, without grand expectations, yet we hoped to lay the foundations for a serious dialogue in the future."
Similar to former president Eisenhower in 1955, Reagan believed that a personal relationship among leaders was the necessary first step to breaking down the barriers of tension that existed between the two countries.
Reagan's goal was to convince Gorbachev that America desired peace above all else.
Reagan described his hopes for the summit as a "mission for peace".
The first thing Reagan said to Gorbachev was "The United States and the Soviet Union are the two greatest countries on Earth, the superpowers.
They are the only ones who can start World War 3, but also the only two countries that could bring peace to the world".
He then continued to emphasize their personal similarities, being born in similar "rural hamlets in the middle of their retrospective countries" and the great responsibilities they held.
Their first meeting would exceed their time limit by over a half an hour.
A Reagan assistant asked Secretary of State George Shultz whether he should interrupt the meeting to keep things punctual.
Shultz responded, "If you think so, then you shouldn't have this job."
The first day, Mikhail Gorbachev argued that the United States did not trust them and that its ruling class was trying to keep the people uneasy.
Ronald Reagan countered that the Soviets had been acting aggressively and had refused to allow American planes use Soviet airfields in post-World War II Germany.
They broke for lunch and Reagan promised Gorbachev he'd have a chance to rebut.
They talked outside for about two hours on the Strategic Defense Initiative, but both stood firm.
Gorbachev accepted Reagan's invitation to the United States in a year, and Reagan was invited to do the same in 1987.
On the second day, Reagan went after human rights, saying that he did not want to tell Gorbachev how to run his country, but that he should ease up on emigration restrictions.
Gorbachev claimed that the Soviets were comparable to the United States and quoted some feminist extremists.
The next session started with arguments about the arms race, then went into SDI.
Gorbachev was "belligerent" and Reagan "stood firm", though they did agree to a joint statement. 
As Brezhnev's health worsened during the late 1970s, the collective leadership became even more "collective".
Brezhnev's death did not alter the balance of power in any radical fashion, and Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were obliged by protocol to rule the country in the very same fashion as Brezhnev.
When Mikhail Gorbachev was elected to the position of General Secretary in March 1985, some observers wondered if he could be the leader to overcome the restraints of the collective leadership.
Gorbachev's reform agenda had succeeded in altering the Soviet political system for good; however, this change made him some enemies.
Many of Gorbachev's closest allies disagreed with him on what reforms were needed, or how radical they should be.
The claim that the Secretariat was the Party's "center of power" was proven false in 1988 when it was shown that Yegor Ligachev chaired its meetings, rather than Gorbachev. 
Soviet Union centre – one-party democracy.
At the 28–30 January 1987 Central Committee Plenum Mikhail Gorbachev suggested a new policy of 'democratization' throughout Soviet society.
Specifically he suggested that future Communist Party elections should offer a choice between multiple candidates, elected by secret ballot, however the CPSU delegates at the Plenum watered down Gorbachev's words and democratic choice within the Communist Party was never significantly implemented.
In addition Gorbachev radically expanded the scope of Glasnost stating that no subject was off limits for open discussion within the media, although the cautious intelligensia took almost a year to begin pushing the boundaries to see if he meant what he said.
For the first time, the Communist Party leader, speaking at the Plenum of the Central Committee, appealed over the heads of its members for the people's support in exchange for a dramatic expansion of liberties.
The tactic proved successful in that within two years political reform was invulnerable to the party 'conservatives', the unintended consequence was that having saved reform, the January 1987 choice, ultimately killed the very system it was designed to save.
On 7 February 1987 dozens of political prisoners were freed in the first group release since the Khrushchev years in the 1950s.
On May 6, 1987 Pamyat, a Russian Nationalist group, held an unsanctioned demonstration in Moscow.
The authorities not only did not break up the demonstration by force—but later, the police kept traffic out of the demonstrators' way while they marched to an impromptu meeting with Boris Yeltsin, head of the Moscow Communist Party, and at that time one of Mikhail Gorbachev's closest allies in the ruling Politburo.
On July 25, 1987 a group of 300 Crimean Tatars, calling for the right to return to the Crimean homeland from which they were deported in 1944, staged a noisy demonstration for several hours near the Kremlin Wall as dozens of police and soldiers looked on.
On 10 September 1987, after a lecture from hard-liner Yegor Ligachev at the Politburo for allowing two small unsanctioned demonstrations on Moscow streets, Boris Yeltsin wrote a letter of resignation to Gorbachev who was holidaying on the Black Sea.
When Gorbachev received the letter he was stunned – nobody in Soviet history had voluntarily resigned from the ranks of the Politburo.
At the October 27, 1987 plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Yeltsin, frustrated that Gorbachev had not addressed any of the issues outlined in his resignation letter asked to speak.
He expressed his discontent with both the slow pace of reform in society, the servility shown to the General Secretary, and opposition to him from Ligachev making his position untenable, before requesting to resign from the Politburo.
This was sensational.
Besides the fact that nobody had ever quit the Politburo, no one in the party had ever had the audacity to address a leader of the party in such a manner in front of the Central Committee since Leon Trotsky in the 1920s.
In his reply, Gorbachev accused Yeltsin of "political immaturity" and "absolute irresponsibility".
Nobody in the Central Committee backed Yeltsin.
Within days news of Yeltsin's actions leaked and rumours of his 'secret speech' at the Central Committee spread throughout Moscow.
Soon fabricated "samizdat" versions began to circulate.
This was the beginning of Yeltsin's re-branding as a rebel and he continued to grow in popularity as an anti-establishment figure.
The next four years of political struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev was a major factor in the destruction of the Soviet Union.
On November 11, 1987 Yeltsin was fired from the post of First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party.