 He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, in which position he oversaw construction of the Great Stavropol Canal.In 1978 he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central Committee and in 1979 joined its governing Politburo.Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief regimes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as General Secretary, the "de facto" head of government, in 1985.