The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War, died at the age of 91

MOSCOW (Reuters) – 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, Russian news agencies cited hospital officials as saying.

Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, struck arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that has divided Europe since World War II and bring about German reunification.

“Mikhail Gorbachev died tonight after a serious and prolonged illness,” the Interfax news agency quoted the Central Russian Medical Hospital as saying in a statement.

Citing the foundation set up by the former Soviet leader once he left office, the TASS news agency said Gorbachev will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife, Raisa, who died in 1999.

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

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

Gorbachev struggled in vain to prevent this collapse.

Vladimir Shevchenko said: “The Gorbachev era is the age of perestroika, the age of hope, the era of our entry into a world without missiles … But there was one miscalculation: we did not know our country well.” He headed Gorbachev’s protocol office when he was a Soviet leader.

“Our union has collapsed… It was a tragedy and a tragedy,” he was quoted by the RIA news agency as saying.

When he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, aged just 54, he had set out to revitalize the system by introducing limited political and economic freedoms, but his reforms spiraled out of control. Read more

His policy of “glasnost” – freedom of speech – allowed for unexpected criticism of the party and the state, but also encouraged the nationalists who began to press for independence in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere.

Many Russians have never forgiven Gorbachev for the disruption caused by his reforms, considering the subsequent decline in their standards of living too prohibitively expensive to pay for democracy.

After visiting Gorbachev in hospital on June 30, liberal economist Ruslan Greenberg told Armed Forces news outlets Zvezda: “We’ve been given all the freedom — but we don’t know what to do with it.”

(Reporting by David Leungren) Written by Guy Faulconbridge Editing by Kevin Levy and Matthew Lewis

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