(CNN) — Mikhail Gorbachevthe last leader of the former Soviet Union, has died at the age of 91.
Gorbachev died after a long illness, Russian state news agencies reported.
“Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev died tonight after a serious and prolonged illness,” the Central Clinical Hospital reported, according to RIA/Novosti on Tuesday.
The man credited with introducing key political and economic reforms in the USSR and helping to end the Cold War had been in failing health for some time.
With his outgoing and charismatic nature, Gorbachev broke the mold of Soviet leaders who until then had been mostly remote and icy figures. Almost from the beginning of his leadership, he fought for significant reforms, to make the system work more efficiently and democratically. Hence the two key phrases of the Gorbachev era: “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring).
“I started these reforms and my guiding stars were freedom and democracy, without bloodshed. Thus the town would cease to be a flock led by a shepherd. They would become citizens,” he said later.
From farm labor 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 child, he engaged in agricultural work alongside his studies, working with his father who was a combine operator. In his later life, Gorbachev said that he was “particularly proud of my ability to detect a combine failure instantly, by sound alone.”
He became a member of the Communist Party in 1952 and completed a law degree at Moscow University in 1955. It was here that he met—and married—fellow student Raisa Titarenko.
In the early 1960s, Gorbachev became head of the agricultural department of the Stavropol region. By the end of the decade, he had risen to the top of the party’s 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 Party of the Soviet Union, who elected him to the Central Committee in 1971 and arranged trips abroad for his rising star.
By 1978, Gorbachev was back in Moscow, and the following year he was chosen as a candidate for membership in the Politburo. His administration 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 Ó since 1980, Gorbachev became more influential in 1982 when his mentor, Andropov, succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the party. He earned a reputation as an enemy of corruption and inefficiency, eventually rising to the top of the party in March 1985.
Mikhail Gorbachev, seen in 1984, when he was a member of the Russian Politburo and second in line to the Kremlin.
“A man with whom one can do business”
Hoping to shift resources to the civilian sector of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev began to argue for an end to the arms race with the West.
Yet 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 more radical reformers, who hoped to do away with the one-party state. and the command economy.
In desperately trying to maintain control of the reform process, he seemed to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis. It also seemed to have had a blind spot for the power of the nationality question: Glasnost created increasingly loud calls for independence for the Baltic states and other Soviet republics in the late 1980s.
He was successful on foreign policy, but mostly from an international perspective, with other world leaders taking note. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called him “a man you can do business with.”
In 1986, face to face with US President Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, Gorbachev made an impressive proposal: eliminate all long-range missiles held by 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 leadership role in the peace process that today characterizes important parts of the international community.”
The pact that resulted, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, endured as a mainstay of arms control for three decades until, in 2019, the United States formally withdrew and the Russian government said it had been trashed.
Gorbachev speaks during a visit to Ottawa, Canada, in 1990.
Rebellion on the hard line
While Gorbachev’s arms control agreements with the US could also be seen as in Soviet interest, the breakup of some of the Eastern European countries, followed by German unification and NATO membership for the newly unified Germany (West Germany had previously been in NATO), it infuriated old-school communists.
In August 1991, hardliners had had enough. With Gorbachev on vacation in the 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-hearted reforms, nonetheless came to his rescue, confronting and defeating the putschists.
But throughout the Soviet Union, one republic after another was declaring independence, and on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president. While reading his resignation speech, Gorbachev outlined what is likely to be his legacy: “The country received freedom, liberated itself politically and spiritually, and that was the most important achievement.”
The red flag that flew over the Kremlin, symbol of the USSR, was lowered. The Soviet Union was over and Yeltsin was in control. “We live in a new world,” Gorbachev said.
In April 2012, Christiane Amanpour of CNN asked him to Gorbachev if he had engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev said that there was nothing in his speeches “until the end” that would have supported its disintegration: “The breakup of the union was the result of the betrayal of the Soviet nomenklatura, of the bureaucracy and also of Yeltsin’s betrayal. He talked about cooperating with me, working with me on a new union treaty, signed the draft union treaty, put his initials on that treaty. But at the same time, he was working behind my back.”
In 1996, Gorbachev ran against Yeltsin for the Russian presidency, but won 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. “In the worst moments I was always very calm and balanced. But now that he’s gone, I don’t want to live. The focal point of our lives is gone,” he said.
But Gorbachev continued to talk about nuclear disarmament, the environment, poverty and, in memory of his wife, created the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation with the family to fight childhood cancer.
Previously, he had established the Green Cross—to deal with ecological issues—and the International Foundation for Socioeconomic 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 chairman of the Russian Social Democratic Party from 2001 until his resignation in 2004 due to conflicts with the party’s leadership and leadership.
In 2007, he became the leader 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 is ‘fine’… it is not. I’m alive, but I can’t say I’m okay.” He explained that the “institutions of democracy are not working efficiently in Russia, because ultimately they are not free.”
A mixed legacy
In an interview with CNN in 2019, Gorbachev said that the United States and Russia must fight to prevent a “New Cold War” from developing despite worsening tensions. “This could turn into 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 the hope that such arms control agreements can be revived.
“All the agreements that are there are preserved and not destroyed,” he said. “But these are the first steps towards the destruction of [lo que] It must not be destroyed in any case”. The ultimate goal of arms control, he added, must be to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether.
Gorbachev’s post-USSR life also included some surprises as he worked to raise money for his causes with appearances in advertisements 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 Saint Andrew, which was bestowed on his 80th birthday in 2011 by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
But to the end, Gorbachev was a more respected leader abroad than at home. In Russia, he was decried by some for destroying the Soviet empire and by others for moving too slowly to free their nation from the clutches 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 the age of 91.