“Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev died this afternoon after a serious and prolonged illness,” the Central Clinical Hospital said, according to RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
The man credited with introducing key political and economic reforms to the USSR and helping to end the Cold War had long been in failing health.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RIA Novosti.
Putin will send a message to Gorbachev’s family and friends on Wednesday, RIA Novosti added.
With his outgoing and charismatic character, Gorbachev broke the mold of Soviet leaders who until then had mostly been remote and icy figures. Almost from the beginning of his leadership, he fought for important reforms, so that the system worked more efficiently and democratically. Hence the two key phrases of the Gorbachev era: “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring).
“I started these reforms and my protagonists were freedom and democracy, without bloodshed. So the people would stop being a herd led by a shepherd. They would become citizens,” he said later.
He will be buried next to his wife at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, RIA Novosti reported citing the Gorbachev Foundation.
From farm work to rising star of the party
Gorbachev had humble beginnings: he was born into a peasant family on March 2, 1931 near Stavropol, and as a boy, he did farm work alongside his studies, working with his father, who was a harvest operator readers Gorbachev later said that he was “particularly proud of my ability to detect a failure in the combination instantly, just by the sound of it.”
He became a member of the Communist Party in 1952 and graduated from Moscow University with a law degree in 1955. It was here that he met and married fellow student Raisa Titarenko.
During the 1960s, Gorbachev became head of the agriculture department of the Stavropol region. By the end of the decade he had risen to the top of the party hierarchy in the region. He caught the attention of Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, members of the Politburo, the main policy-making body of the communist side of the Soviet Union, who got him elected to the Central Committee in 1971 and arranged trips to foreign for his rising star. .
In 1978, Gorbachev returned to Moscow, and the following year he was elected as a candidate member of the Politburo. His management of Soviet agriculture was not a success. As he realized, the collective system was fundamentally flawed in more ways than one.
A full member of the Politburo since 1980, Gorbachev became more influential in 1982 when his mentor, Andropov, succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the party’s general secretary. He built a reputation as an enemy of corruption and inefficiency, eventually rising to the top of the party in March 1985.
“A man to do business with”
Hoping to channel resources into the civilian sector of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev began arguing for an end to the arms race with the West.
However, throughout his six years in office, Gorbachev always seemed to move too fast for the party establishment — which saw its privileges threatened — and too slow for the more radical reformers, who hoped to end the one party state and the command economy.
Desperately trying to maintain control of the reform process, he appeared to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis. He also seemed to have had a blind spot for the power of the nationality question: Glasnost created increasingly strong calls for independence from the Baltics and other Soviet republics in the late 1980s.
He was successful in foreign policy, but mostly from an international perspective, with other world leaders taking note. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called him “a man to do business with”.
In 1986, face-to-face with US President Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavík, Iceland, Gorbachev made a startling proposal: eliminate all long-range missiles from the United States and the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 “for his leading role in the peace process that today characterizes important parts of the international community.”
The resulting pact, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, remained a mainstay of arms control for three decades until, in 2019, the United States formally withdrew and the Russian government said it had been sent to the trash.
The revolt of the tough
Although Gorbachev’s arms control agreements with the US could also be seen in the Soviet interest, the breakup of some Eastern European countries, followed by German unification and membership of the ‘NATO for the new unified Germany (West Germany had previously been in NATO). ), angry old-school communists.
By August 1991, the die-hards had had enough. With Gorbachev on vacation in Crimea, they staged a revolt. Boris Yeltsin, the president of the largest Soviet republic — Russia — and a fierce critic of what he considered Gorbachev’s half-way reforms, nevertheless came to their rescue, confronting and defeating the coup plotters.
But throughout the Soviet Union, republics — one after the other — declared independence and on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president. While reading his resignation speech, Gorbachev defined what his legacy will likely be: “The country received freedom, it was liberated politically and spiritually, and this was the most important achievement.”
The red flag flying over the Kremlin, symbol of the USSR, was lowered. The Soviet Union had ended and Yeltsin was in control. “We live in a new world,” Gorbachev said.
In April 2012, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Gorbachev if he engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev said that there was nothing in his speeches “to the end” that supported its disintegration: “The breakup of the union was the result of the betrayal of the Soviet nomenclature, of the bureaucracy and also of the betrayal of Yeltsin. He talked about cooperating. with me, working with me on a new union treaty, signed the draft of the union treaty, initialed this treaty. But at the same time, he was working behind my back.”
In 1996 Gorbachev ran against Yeltsin for the Russian presidency, but got less than 1% of the vote.
Speaking after the presidency
Three years later, Gorbachev lost the love of his life, his wife of 46 years, Raisa, to cancer. The couple had a daughter, Irina. “At the worst times I was always very calm and level-headed. But now that she’s gone, I don’t want to live. The focal point of our lives is gone,” he said.
But Gorbachev continued to speak out on nuclear disarmament, the environment, poverty and, in memory of his wife, created the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation with his family to fight childhood cancer.
Previously, he had established the Green Cross — to deal with ecological issues — and the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, or the Gorbachev Foundation. In 2011, Gorbachev also launched the annual “Gorbachev Awards” to celebrate “those who have changed the world for the better”.
Gorbachev’s involvement in Russian politics also continued. He was head of the Social Democratic Party of Russia from 2001 until his resignation in 2004 due to conflicts with the party’s leadership and leadership.
In 2007, he became head of a new Russian political movement: the Union of Social Democrats, which in turn created the opposition Independent Democratic Party of Russia.
He told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2012 that he agreed that Russian democracy was “alive,” but added: “That it’s ‘fine’ … it’s not. I’m alive, but I can’t say I’m fine “. He explained that “the institutions of democracy do not work efficiently in Russia, because ultimately they are not free.”
mixed legacy
In an interview with CNN in 2019, Gorbachev said the US and Russia must strive to prevent a “new cold war” from developing despite worsening tensions. “This could turn out to be a hot war that could mean the destruction of our entire civilization. This must not be allowed,” he said.
And when asked about the demise of the 1987 treaty he signed with Reagan, Gorbachev expressed hope that those arms control agreements could be revived.
“All the existing agreements are preserved and not destroyed,” he said. “But these are the first steps towards the destruction of [that which] it must not be destroyed under any circumstances.” The ultimate goal of arms control, he added, must be to get rid of nuclear weapons entirely.
Gorbachev’s post-USSR life also included some surprises as he worked to raise money for his causes with appearances in ads for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton. In 2004 Gorbachev won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for “Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf / Beintus: Wolf Tracks”, which he recorded with former US President Bill Clinton and actress Sophia Loren .
Other awards included the 2008 Medal of Freedom from the US National Constitution Center and Russia’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, presented to him on his 80th birthday in 2011 by then-Pres. Russian Dmitry Medvedev.
But until the end, Gorbachev was a leader more respected in other countries than at home. In Russia, he was reviled by some for destroying the Soviet empire and by others for moving too slowly to free his nation from the grip of communism. In the West, however, he remains the Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped end the Cold War.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Gorbachev died at age 91.
CNN’s Tim Lister contributed to the report.