The last leader of the Soviet Union (USSR) and last leader of the Cold War who was still alive, Mikhail Gorbachev, died yesterday Tuesday, August 30, 2022, in Russia, at the age of 91, said a hospital in Moscow, quoted by Russian press agencies.
He died of a long serious illness, “said the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB) dependent on the Russian presidency.
An anonymous source, quoted by the TASS agency, said that Mikhail Gorbachev would be buried with his wife Raïssa Gorbacheva, who died in 1999, in the Novodiévitchi cemetery in Moscow.
Coming to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had launched a wave of political and economic reforms aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union confronted with serious crises.
A supporter of a policy of rapprochement with the West and for its role in the end of the East-West confrontation in the 20th century, in 1990 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Between 1990 and 1991, he held the post of president of the Soviet Union, before finally having to resign on December 25, 1991, which led to the end of the USSR.
After his accession to the secretary general post of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, at the age of 54, Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced reforms – known as “Perestroika and Glasnost” – which had accelerated the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Many Russians have never forgiven him the consequences of these reforms, saying that the fall in their standard of living was too high to pay for democracy.
The years following the dissolution of the USSR remain indeed a trauma for many Russians, plunged into dazzling poverty, confronted with political chaos and a bloody war in Chechnya.
With the coming to power in 2000 of Vladimir Putin, who said he considers the disappearance of the USSR as the “greatest geopolitical disaster” of the 20th century, the State puts the Society at the time while ensuring the return of Russian power to the international scene.
Mikhail Gorbachev has spent the last twenty years behind politics and lived in almost anonymity. Only a play in Moscow last year, celebrating the intimate Gorbachev had made a packed room.
According to the Kremlin spokesperson Vladimir Putin expressed his “deep condolences” after the death of Mikhail Gorbachev and will send in the morning (on Wednesday, August 31, 2022) “a telegram of condolences to the family and relatives” of the former leader.
