Mikhail Gorbachev was born in the small village of Privolnoye (in the Stavropol Territory) to Sergei and Maria Panteleyvna Gorbachev. His parents and his grandparents had all been peasant farmers before Stalin's collectivization program. With all farms owned by the government, Gorbachev's father went to work as a driver of a combine-harvester.
Gorbachev was ten years old when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941