Last Soviet leader Gorbachev, who ended Cold War and won Nobel prize,  dies aged 91

ArmInfo. Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday at the age of 91,  Reuters reports quoting hospital officials in Moscow as saying. 

Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, forged arms reduction deals  with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove  the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War Two and  bring about the reunification of Germany.

But his internal reforms helped weaken the Soviet Union to the point  where it fell apart, a moment that President Vladimir Putin has  called the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the twentieth  century.

"Mikhail Gorbachev passed away tonight after a serious and protracted  disease," said Russia's Central Clinical Hospital.

Putin expressed "his deepest condolences", Kremlin spokesman Dmitry  Peskov told Interfax. "Tomorrow he will send a telegram of  condolences to his family and friends," he said.

Putin said in 2018 he would reverse the Soviet Union's disintegration  if he could, news agencies reported.

World leaders were quick to pay tribute. European Commission chief  Ursula von der Leyen said Gorbachev, who was awarded the Nobel Peace  Prize in 1990, had opened the way for a free Europe.

U.S. President Joe Biden said he had believed in "glasnost and  perestroika - openness and restructuring - not as mere slogans, but  as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many  years of isolation and deprivation."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, citing Putin's invasion of  Ukraine, said Gorbachev's "tireless commitment to opening up Soviet  society remains an example to us all".

WESTERN PARTNERSHIPS

After decades of Cold War tension and confrontation, Gorbachev  brought the Soviet Union closer to the West than at any point since  World War Two.

"He gave freedom to hundreds of millions of people in Russia and  around it, and also half of Europe," said former Russian liberal  opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky. "Few leaders in history have had  such a decisive influence on their time."

But Gorbachev saw his legacy wrecked late in life, as the invasion of  Ukraine brought Western sanctions crashing down on Moscow, and  politicians in both Russia and the West began to speak of a new Cold  War.

"Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life's work, freedom, was  effectively destroyed by Putin," said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior  fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He will be buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife  Raisa, who died in 1999, said Tass, citing the foundation that the  ex-Soviet leader set up once he left office.

"We are all orphans now. But not everyone realizes it," said Alexei  Venediktov, head of a liberal media radio outlet that closed down  after coming under pressure over its coverage of the Ukraine war.

When pro-democracy protests rocked Soviet bloc nations in communist  Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev refrained from using force - unlike  previous Kremlin leaders who had sent tanks to crush uprisings in  Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

But the protests fuelled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics  of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated over the next two years in  chaotic fashion. read more

Gorbachev - who was briefly deposed in an August 1991 coup by party  hardliners - struggled vainly to prevent that collapse.

TURBULENT REFORMS

"The era of Gorbachev is the era of perestroika, the era of hope, the  era of our entry into a missile-free world ... but there was one  miscalculation: we did not know our country well," said Vladimir  Shevchenko, who headed Gorbachev's protocol office when he was Soviet  leader.

"Our union fell apart, that was a tragedy and his tragedy," RIA news  agency cited him as saying.

On becoming general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985,  aged just 54, he had set out to revitalise the system by introducing  limited political and economic freedoms, but his reforms spun out of  control. read more

"He was a good man - he was a decent man. I think his tragedy is in a  sense that he was too decent for the country he was leading," said  Gorbachev biographer William Taubman, a professor emeritus at Amherst  College in Massachusetts.

Gorbachev's policy of "glasnost" allowed previously unthinkable  criticism of the party and the state, but also emboldened  nationalists who began to press for independence in the Baltic  republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere.

Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turbulence that his  reforms unleashed, considering the subsequent plunge in their living  standards too high a price to pay for democracy.

Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-appointed official in a part of Ukraine now  occupied by pro-Moscow forces, said Gorbachev had "deliberately led  the (Soviet) Union to its demise" and called him a traitor.

"He gave us all freedom - but we don't know what to do with it,"  liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet  Zvezda after visiting Gorbachev in hospital in June.