Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has died “after a serious and long illness,” the Central Clinical Hospital reported on Tuesday. He was 91 years old. Gorbachev will be buried at Moscow’s Novo-Dyevitchiye cemetery, next to his wife, Raisa, Russia’s state-run news agency Tass reported.
Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union before it dissolved. He ruled as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991 and was the country’s only president, a title he took in the waning months of his time in office.
Young and energetic, his rise in the ’80s signaled a new spring for what was then one of the world’s two superpowers. A political insider with a view to the outside, Gorbachev set into motion radical reforms — that led to a series of unintended events.
Gorbachev was born in 1931, in the village of Privolnoye in southern Russia, to a peasant family living in a house with dirt floors. His family was directly affected by Josef Stalin’s “Terror,” with two of Gorbachev’s grandfathers arrested and exiled. During World War II, their village was overrun by Nazi troops.
Gorbachev worked the land as a teenager, and was awarded with his father the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, one of the USSR’s highest honors, for gathering a record harvest.
After university in Moscow, Gorbachev quickly became a young regional party boss. His energy attracted the attention of Yury Andropov, the powerful head of the KGB, who brought him back to Moscow as a protégé.
By then, the Soviet superpower was in trouble: the centrally planned economy was rotting and its lag behind Western countries was increasingly obvious.
The Soviet Union’s gerontic leadership symbolized its decrepit condition. Appointed to the Politburo at 47, Gorbachev was almost two decades younger than his colleagues. In 1985, Konstantin Chernenko died — the third elderly leader to die in office in as many years — and Gorbachev became general secretary, brushing aside a succession challenge.
Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.
A quarter-century after the collapse, Gorbachev told The Associated Press that he had not considered using widespread force to try to keep the USSR together because he feared chaos in a nuclear country.”The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And it would have immediately pushed the country into a civil war,” he said.Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War and spent his later years collecting accolades and awards from all corners of the world. Yet he was widely despised at home.
