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

Candidate passages:
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.
Gorbachev rose 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 elected a candidate (non-voting) member of 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.
Andropov died in 1984, and indicated that he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him as General Secretary.
Instead, the aged Konstantin Chernenko took power, even though he himself was terminally ill. After Chernenko's 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.
He was also the first person to be elected party leader after having initially failed in a previous bid for the post. 
Soviet Union centre – the new General Secretary.
Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on 11 March 1985, only three hours after Konstantin Chernenko's death.
At age 54, he was the youngest member of the Politburo.
Gorbachev's primary goal as General Secretary was to revive the Soviet economy after the stagnant Brezhnev years.
In an effort to revive the stagnant Soviet economy, in 1985 new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a process of increasing political liberalization (glasnost/perestroika) in the communist one-party state.
In 1985, he announced that the Soviet economy was stalled and that reorganization was needed.
Gorbachev soon realized that fixing the Soviet economy would be nearly impossible without reforming the political and social structure of the Communist nation.
The reforms began in personnel changes.
On 23 April 1985 Gorbachev brought his two proteges Yegor Ligachev, and Nikolai Ryzhkov into the Politburo as full members, and sensibly took the opportunity to keep the 'power' ministries happy by promoting KGB Head Viktor Chebrikov from candidate to full member of the Politburo, and appointing Minister of Defence Marshal Sergei Sokolov a Politburo candidate member.
Nikonov was brought into the CPSU Central Committee Secretariat.
However, this liberalization led to the emergence from 1986 onwards of nationalist movements and ethnic disputes within the diverse republics of the Soviet Union.
It also led to the revolutions of 1989, which saw the mainly peaceful (Romania excepted) toppling of the Soviet imposed Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact, which in turn increased pressure on Gorbachev to introduce greater democracy and autonomy for the Soviet Union's constituent republics.
Under Gorbachev's leadership, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1989 introduced limited competitive elections to a new central legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies, although a ban on other political parties was not lifted until 1990.
A 17 March 1991 referendum showed 76.4% of Soviet citizens voting to retain the Union.
However, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Georgia, and Armenia did not participate.
In May 1985 in Leningrad Gorbachev made a speech advocating widespread reforms.
One of the first reforms Gorbachev introduced was the anti-alcohol campaign, begun in May 1985, which was designed to fight widespread alcoholism in the Soviet Union.
Prices of vodka, wine, and beer were raised, and their sales were restricted.
It was a serious blow to the state budget, a loss of approximately 100 billion rubles according to Alexander Yakovlev, after alcohol production migrated to the black market economy.
The purpose of these reforms, however, was to prop up the existing centrally planned economy, unlike later reforms, which tended toward market socialism.
On 1 July 1985 Gorbachev promoted Eduard Shevardnadze First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party to full member of the Politburo, and the following day appointed Shevardnadze as Minister of Foreign Affairs replacing Andrei Gromyko.
Gromyko, disparaged as "Mr Nyet" in the West, had served for 28 years as Minister of Foreign Affairs and was considered an 'old thinker' who was kicked upstairs to the mainly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which was officially Soviet Head of State.
Also on July 1, 1985 Gorbachev took the opportunity to dispose of his main rival by removing Grigory Romanov from the Politburo, and brought Boris Yeltsin and Lev Zaikov into the CPSU Central Committee Secretariat.
In the fall Gorbachev continued his program to bring forward younger and more energetic men into the government.
On September 27, 1985 Nikolai Ryzhkov replaced 79 year old Nikolai Tikhonov as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, effectively the Soviet Prime Minister, and on 14 October 1985 Nikolai Talyzin replaced Nikolai Baibakov as Chairman of the State Planning Committee (GOSPLAN).
At the next Central Committee meeting on 15 October 1985 Tikhonov retired from the Politburo and Nikolai Talyzin became a candidate member.
Finally on 23 December 1985 Gorbachev appointed Boris Yeltsin First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party replacing Viktor Grishin. 
The Geneva Summit of 1985 was a Cold War-era meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
It was held on November 19 and 20, 1985, between U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
The two leaders met for the first time to hold talks on international diplomatic relations and the arms race. 
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. 
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Party's first leader to have been born after the Revolution.
As de facto ruler of the USSR, he tried to reform the stagnating Party and the state economy by introducing "glasnost" ("openness"), "perestroika" ("restructuring"), "demokratizatsiya" ("democratization"), and "uskoreniye" ("acceleration" of economic development), which were launched at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February 1986.