paragraph_text: In 1980, a vocational school for deaf adolescents was opened in the area of Managua called Villa Libertad. By 1983, there were over 400 deaf students enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language program emphasized spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers was limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet). The program achieved little success, with most students failing to grasp the concept of Spanish words.

paragraph_text: On September 10, 1987, after a lecture from hardliner Yegor Ligachev at the Politburo for allowing these two unsanctioned demonstrations in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin wrote a letter of resignation to Gorbachev, who had been holidaying on the Black Sea. Gorbachev was stunned – no one had ever voluntarily resigned from the Politburo. At the October 27, 1987, plenary meeting of the Central Committee, Yeltsin, frustrated that Gorbachev had not addressed any of the issues outlined in his resignation letter, criticized the slow pace of reform, servility to the general secretary, and opposition from Ligachev that had led to his (Yeltsin's) resignation. No one had ever addressed the Party leader so brazenly in front of the Central Committee since Leon Trotsky in the 1920s. In his reply, Gorbachev accused Yeltsin of "political immaturity" and "absolute irresponsibility." No one backed Yeltsin.

paragraph_text: Doubts remained over the authority of the Belavezha Accords to disband the Soviet Union, since they were signed by only three republics. However, on December 21, 1991, representatives of 11 of the 12 former republics – all except Georgia – signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the dissolution of the Union and formally established the CIS. They also "accepted" Gorbachev's resignation. While Gorbachev hadn't made any formal plans to leave the scene yet, he did tell CBS News that he would resign as soon as he saw that the CIS was indeed a reality.

paragraph_text: Unlike most languages that use alphabets to indicate the pronunciation, Chinese characters have developed from logograms that do not always give hints to its pronunciation. Although the written characters remained relatively consistent for the last two thousand years, the pronunciation and grammar in different regions has developed to an extent that the varieties of the spoken language are often mutually unintelligible. As a series of migration to the south throughout the history, the regional languages of the south, including Xiang, Wu, Gan, Min, Yue (Cantonese), and Hakka often show traces of Old Chinese or Middle Chinese. From the Ming dynasty onward, Beijing has been the capital of China and the dialect spoken in Beijing has had the most prestige among other varieties. With the founding of the Republic of China, Standard Mandarin was designated as the official language, based on the spoken language of Beijing. Since then, other spoken varieties are regarded as fangyan (dialects). Cantonese is still the most commonly used language in Hong Kong, Macau and among some overseas Chinese communities, whereas Southern Min has been accepted in Taiwan as an important local language along with Mandarin.

paragraph_text: Togo is a multilingual country. According to Ethnologue, 39 distinct languages are spoken in the country, many of them by communities that number fewer than 100,000 members. Of the 39 languages, the sole official language is French. Two spoken indigenous languages were designated politically as national languages in 1975: Ewé (Ewe: Èʋegbe; French: Evé) and Kabiyé; they are also the two most widely spoken indigenous languages.

paragraph_text: Ilyukhin was a sharp critic of the Soviet and Russian authorities since perestroika. Over the years, he brought charges of high treason against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian Presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

paragraph_text: Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation is the third and final spoken word album by the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, released in January 1960 on Verve Records. The album was recorded during 1959, prior to the publication of Kerouac's sixth novel, "Doctor Sax".

paragraph_text: Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, and is widely spoken by most of population. Brazilian Sign Language is also an official language. Minority languages include indigenous languages and languages of more recent European and Asian immigrants. The population speaks or signs approximately 210 languages, of which 180 are indigenous. Less than forty thousand people actually speak any one of the indigenous languages in the Brazilian territory.

paragraph_text: Many different languages are spoken in Mexico. The indigenous languages are from eleven distinct language families, including four isolates and one that immigrated from the United States. The Mexican government recognizes 68 national languages, 63 of which are indigenous, including around 350 dialects of those languages. The large majority of the population is monolingual in Spanish. Some immigrant and indigenous populations are bilingual, while some indigenous people are monolingual in their languages. Mexican Sign Language is spoken by much of the deaf population, and there are one or two indigenous sign languages as well.

paragraph_text: The language has numerous regional dialects which are generally not mutually intelligible. It is employed throughout the Tibetan plateau and Bhutan and is also spoken in parts of Nepal and northern India, such as Sikkim. In general, the dialects of central Tibet (including Lhasa), Kham, Amdo and some smaller nearby areas are considered Tibetan dialects. Other forms, particularly Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Sherpa, and Ladakhi, are considered by their speakers, largely for political reasons, to be separate languages. However, if the latter group of Tibetan-type languages are included in the calculation, then 'greater Tibetan' is spoken by approximately 6 million people across the Tibetan Plateau. Tibetan is also spoken by approximately 150,000 exile speakers who have fled from modern-day Tibet to India and other countries.

paragraph_text: On 24 February, Boris Kevorkov, the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region party secretary and an Azerbaijan loyalist, was dismissed.Karabakh Armenian leaders complained that the region had neither Armenian language textbooks in schools nor in television broadcasting, and that Azerbaijan's Communist Party General Secretary Heydar Aliyev had extensively attempted to "Azerify" the region and increase the influence and the number of Azerbaijanis living in Nagorno-Karabakh, while at the same time reducing its Armenian population (in 1987, Aliyev would step down as General Secretary of Azerbaijan's Politburo). By 1988, the Armenian population of Karabakh had dwindled to nearly three-quarters of the total population.The movement was spearheaded by popular Armenian figures and found support among intellectuals in Russia as well. According to journalist Thomas de Waal some members of the Russian intelligentsia, such as the dissident Andrei Sakharov expressed support for Armenians. More prominent support for the movement among the Moscow elite was interpreted by some in the public: in November 1987 L'Humanité published the personal comments made by Abel Aganbegyan, an economic adviser to Gorbachev, to Armenians living in France, in which he suggested that Nagorno-Karabakh could be ceded to Armenia. Prior to the declaration, Armenians had begun to protest and stage workers' strikes in Yerevan, demanding a unification with the enclave. This prompted Azerbaijani counter-protests in Baku.

paragraph_text: Lenni Montiel is the United Nations a Assistant Secretary-General for Economiic Development in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Prior to this appointment of 18 November 2014, Mr. Montiel was an Assistant Secretary-General of Social, Economic and Development Affairs.

paragraph_text: Albert Konstantinovich Chernenko (; January 6, 1935 – April 11, 2009) was a Russian philosopher, best known for his innovations in the field of social and legal philosophy. He was the son of Konstantin Chernenko, the fifth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

paragraph_text: On March 17, 1991, an all-Russian referendum created the post of President of the RSFSR. On June 12, Boris Yeltsin was elected President of Russia by popular vote. During an unsuccessful coup attempt on August 19–21, 1991 in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union and Russia, President of Russia Yeltsin strongly supported the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

paragraph_text: In 1949, Winston Churchill was named ``Man of the Half - Century '', and the last issue of 1989 named Mikhail Gorbachev as`` Man of the Decade''. The December 31, 1999 issue of Time named Albert Einstein the ``Person of the Century ''. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi were chosen as runners - up.

paragraph_text: In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was removed from his position of power and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev. Under his rule, the Russian SFSR and the rest of the Soviet Union went through an era of stagnation. Even after he died in 1982, the era didn’t end until Mikhail Gorbachev took power and introduced liberal reforms in Soviet society.

paragraph_text: United Nations Security Council resolution 718, adopted unanimously on 31 October 1991, after recalling resolutions 668 (1990) and 717 (1991), and noting that at the Paris Conference, a political agreement was signed by parties to the situation in Cambodia, the Council authorised the Secretary-General to submit a report on the costs for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, prior to its establishment.

paragraph_text: Crisis in the Kremlin is a 1991 strategy video game with managerial aspects in which the player acts as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 2017. The player assumes the role of the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, the nationalist Boris Yeltsin, or the hardliner Yegor Ligachev. Actual jokes recorded by the KGB can be found in the gameplay, depicting the concerns of the Soviet people in a humorous light. The game was developed and released at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and breaking apart with the game's events making reference to that. Indeed, the Soviet Union dissolved in the same year as the game's release.

paragraph_text: Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on March 11, 1985, three hours after predecessor Konstantin Chernenko's death at age 73. Gorbachev, aged 54, was the youngest member of the Politburo. His initial goal as general secretary was to revive the Soviet economy, and he realized that doing so would require reforming underlying political and social structures. The reforms began with personnel changes of senior Brezhnev-era officials who would impede political and economic change. On April 23, 1985, Gorbachev brought two protégés, Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, into the Politburo as full members. He kept the "power" ministries happy by promoting KGB Head Viktor Chebrikov from candidate to full member and appointing Minister of Defence Marshal Sergei Sokolov as a Politburo candidate.

paragraph_text: The State Committee on the State of Emergency (), abbreviated as SCSE (), was a group of eight high-level Soviet officials within the Soviet government, the Communist Party, and the KGB, who attempted a coup d'état against Mikhail Gorbachev on 19 August 1991. American publicist Georges Obolensky also called it the Gang of Eight.

Question: What language was used by the general secretary prior to Mikhail Gorbachev?
Answer: Russian