August 31, (THEWILL) – Former Soviet President, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has died on Tuesday evening, aged 91.
His death was announced on Tuesday, by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital.
“Today in the evening (Tuesday), after a long and serious illness, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev passed away”, the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB) in Moscow, said in a statement.
It is unclear how the last Soviet President died, his office said earlier that he was undergoing treatment at the hospital.
While reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness”, earlier in June, reports had said the former president was taken to the hospital after suffering a serious kidney ailment.
Also in June, the Gorbachev Foundation spokesman, Vladimir Polyakov, disclosed that the former President had been undergoing treatment for several years, due to kidney problems, including dialysis.
After visiting him in hospital on June 30, liberal economist, Russian Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet Zvezda: “He gave us all freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it.”
His wife, Raisa, had died in 1999.
Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation.
Known for his idealism of pacifism, Gorbachev’s efforts towards descaling the cold war, had forged partnerships with Western Powers to pull back the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War Two.
His deals with 1980s American counterpart, Ronald Reagan – particularly their 1986 landmark summit in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, which eventually led to a breakthrough on nuclear weapons, forged through the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – were huge moments in preserving peace between the world’s then two super powers.
He made tremendous achievements in his deal for arms reduction with the US.
British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, once said of the Soviet chief: “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
He had refrained from using force when pro-democracy protests erupted across the Soviet bloc in communist Eastern Europe in 1989.
Gorbachev rose to become the secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. He had ambitions to introduce limited political and economic freedoms.
At home he promised and delivered greater openness, as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
He ended the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.
When he came to power, Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer”, he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.
A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labour force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little, but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.
The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.
The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.
It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.
The openness Gorbachev sought (what came to be known as glasnost) and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him.
His free speech policy, known as ‘glasnost’, gave space for criticism of the party and the state and inspired nationalists in the Soviet republics to push for independence and by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) finally fell into 15 independent entities, ending the Cold war.
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