Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal (; 10 November 1913 – 13 June 2005) was a Portuguese communist revolutionary and politician. He was one of the major opponents of the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo. He served as secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) from 1961 to 1992. He was one of the most pro-Soviet of all Western Europe communist leaders, often supporting the Soviet Union's foreign policies, including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. During the 1970s, Cunhal supported Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s political agenda, and strongly opposed Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policies in the 1980s. Life Cunhal was born in Coimbra, the third child of Avelino Henriques da Costa Cunhal (Seia, Seia, 28 October 1887 – Coimbra, Sé Nova, 19 December 1966) and wife (m. Coimbra, Sé Nova, 22 August 1908) Mercedes Simões Ferreira Barreirinhas (Coimbra, Sé Nova, 5 May 1888 – Lisbon, 12 September 1971). His father was a lawyer in Coimbra and Seia, and later on in Lisbon, and came from a family of rural bourgeoisie, related to a rich and more aristocratic family, the Cunhal Patrício. His mother was a devout Catholic who wished her son had also become one. He also studied Law at the University of Lisbon, where he joined the Portuguese Communist Party, which was an illegal organisation, in 1931. The deaths of his younger sister Maria Mansueta Barrerinhas Cunhal (Coimbra – Seia, 13 January 1921) and of his older brother António José Barreirinhas Cunhal (Coimbra, 1910 – Lisbon, 1932) struck the grief of both his parents and brothers, but specially of his mother and Álvaro, of whom they had always been close. He visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1935 to attend the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. He joined the Central Committee of the party in 1936. His first arrest occurred in 1937, at the age of 23. While in prison, Cunhal submitted his final thesis on the topic of abortion and obtained his law degree (the jury included future Prime Minister Marcello Caetano, who would later replace Salazar). In his thesis, Cunhal supports the legalization of abortion in Portugal, while he also scrutinised the case of abortion in the Soviet Union, who had been made legal during Vladimir Lenin rule but outlawed once again by Stalin, in 1936 (which Cunhal supported, claiming abortion was not practised anymore in the Soviet Union), highlighting the dangers