"...His father was a combine harvester operator and World War II veteran, named Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev. His mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva (née Gopkalo), was a kolkhoz worker.[8] He was brought up mainly by his Ukrainian maternal grandparents. In his teens, he operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law.
In 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence master's degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture. While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and soon became very active within the party.
Gorbachev met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko, daughter of a Ukrainian railway engineer, at Moscow State University. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation. She gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya (Ири́на Миха́йловна Вирга́нская), in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999.[9] Gorbachev has two granddaughters (Ksenia and Anastasia) and one great granddaughter (Aleksandra)...."