Former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev has died at the age of 91, Russian news agencies said on Tuesday, citing hospital officials.
A major political figure of the 20th century, Mikhail Gorbachev died on Tuesday August 30 at the age of 91. ” Today in the evening (Tuesday), after a long serious illness, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev died “Said the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB) dependent on the Russian presidency.
Last secretary general of the central committee of the USSR, then first and last president of the USSR, he spent six years in the Kremlin, from 1985 to 1991. Six years, during which the face of his country and a good part of Europe found itself profoundly upset. Seen in the West as a reformer who gave the Soviets back their freedoms, Gorbachev remained a very controversial figure in Russia until his death, where many consider him, above all, as the gravedigger of the USSR.
Mikhail Gorbachev, an advocate of arms control and democracy-oriented reforms in the 1980s, was widely credited with helping to end the Cold Warbut criticized for the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, deemed unnecessary and painful by its Russian detractors.
With Mikhail Gorbachev, the Western vocabulary was enriched with two Russian words: “perestroika” and “glasnost”, two terms which symbolize the reform policy he initiated, opening the door to the upheavals of the early 1990s, which led the Soviet system to its downfall.
Supporter of a policy of rapprochement with the West, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
(More information to follow…)