"Biographers Doder and Branson related that after Stalin's death, Gorbachev's "ideology would never be doctrinal again", but noted that he remained "a true believer" in the Soviet system.Doder and Branson noted that at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, Gorbachev was seen to be an orthodox Marxist-Leninist; that year, the biographer Zhores Medvedev stated that "Gorbachev is neither a liberal nor a bold reformist".