Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but could not prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 91, Russian news agencies reported on Tuesday.
Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, forged arms reduction agreements with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War II and bring about the reunification of Germany .
“Mikhail Gorbachev died tonight after a serious and prolonged illness,” the Interfax news agency quoted Russia’s Central Clinical Hospital as saying in a statement.
The Russian Embassy in Canada confirmed his death to CBC News in an emailed statement.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his “deepest condolences” over Gorbachev’s death, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Interfax.
“Tomorrow he will send a telegram of condolence to his family and friends,” he said.
Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan exchange pens during the signing ceremony for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at the White House on December 8, 1987. Gorbachev’s translator Pavel Palazhchenko stands in the middle. (Bob Daugherty/The Associated Press)
Putin in 2005 called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century and in 2018 said he would reverse it if he could.
After decades of Cold War tension and confrontation, Gorbachev brought the Soviet Union closer to the West than at any time since World War II.
But he saw the job tarnished in the final months of his life, as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine led to Western sanctions against Moscow, while politicians in both Russia and the West start talking openly about a new Cold War.
“Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life’s work, freedom, was effectively destroyed by Putin,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
He will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife, Raisa, who died in 1999, the Tass news agency said, citing the foundation the former Soviet leader set up after leaving office.
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The reforms emboldened the nationalists
When pro-democracy protests swept the Soviet-bloc nations of communist Eastern Europe in 1989, he refrained from using force, unlike previous Kremlin leaders who had sent tanks to crush the 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 disintegrated over the next two years in chaotic fashion.
Gorbachev fought in vain to prevent this collapse.
“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 a miscalculation: we did not know well our country,” said Vladimir Shevchev, who headed Gorbachev’s group. protocol office when he was Soviet leader.
“Our union collapsed, this was a tragedy and their tragedy,” the RIA news agency said.
Becoming 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.
Gorbachev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visit a photo exhibition commemorating his 80th birthday at the Kennedy museum in Berlin February 24, 2011. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)
His policy of “glasnost”—free speech—allowed previously unthinkable criticism of the party and the state, but also emboldened nationalists who began pushing for independence in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and other places.
Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turmoil his reforms unleashed, seeing the subsequent drop in their living standards as too high a price to pay for democracy.
“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 on June 30.
Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko said Gorbachev “lived to see some of his worst fears realized and his brightest dreams drowned in blood and dirt. But historians will remember him fondly, and one day, I think, the Russians.”
Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney called Gorbachev “the end of a long list of great leaders of the 1980s and 1990s.”
“He was kinder than the Soviet leaders of the past — all the stern apparatchiks of the communist regime who knew very little about the rest of the world and seemed less inclined to learn anything about it, about us,” Mulroney told CBC’s As It Happens .
Gorbachev was “a completely different kettle of fish,” he said.
“He looked forward. He wanted good relations. He wanted the Soviet Union to be respected. And he wanted to transform it from within to earn that respect and admiration from others.”
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney shares a laugh with Gorbachev during their meeting on November 21, 1989. (Ron Poling/The Canadian Press)