Mikhail Gorbachev was a soviet statesman, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and president of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

He was born in Privolnoye, Russia. He studied at Moscow State University and Stavropos Agricultural Institute. He worked as a machine operator, among the jobs he held, and joined the Communist Party in 1952. In which he held a variety of senior posts in the Stavropol city and district Party organization and was elected a deputy to the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1970 and a member of the Party Central Committee in 1971. He became secretary for agriculture from 1979 to 1985, a member of the Politburo in 1980, and, general secretary of the Central Committee.

In 1988 he also became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and in 1990, the first (and last) executive president of the USSR. On becoming party general secretary he launched a radical program of reform ) and restructuring of the Soviet economic and political system, the perestrojka. He worked to establish a greater degree of civil liberty, public debate, journalistic and cultural freedom, and a re-evalutation of Soviet history, which was allowed under the policy of glasnost. Glasnost (openness) was a policy that imposed inforation be more open. In foreign and defence affairs he reduced military use, and was in favor of destroying nuclear weapons.

In 1991 there was a coup that managed to remove Gorbachev from the Kremlin for a while. However the coup was unsuccessful and Gorbachev returned to power only to relinquish command to Boris Yeltsin, thus ending the communist rule in Russia.

Richey Edwards said about this song (revol, or: 'lover' when read backwards): 'All those lines like 'Brezhnev married into group sex' are just analogies really. It's trying to say that relationships in politics, and relationships in general, are failures.'