On Tuesday, he died of a “serious and long illness” at the age of 91 in Russia, said the Central Clinical Hospital where he was being treated.
His death comes in the midst of the offensive of the current Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, launched on February 24 and denounced in the West as a resurgence of Russian imperialism.
Simple son of a peasant, Mikhail Gorbachev followed a classic course of apparatchik to become at the age of 54, on March 11, 1985, the number one of a Soviet empire then battered economically and which was entangled in an endless war in Afghanistan.
His youth sets him apart. In less than three years, since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, the Soviet CP has known two aging general secretaries who died in this post, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Tchernenko.
Conscious that the crisis lurks, Mr. Gorbachev launches a liberalization called “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (transparency) to reform the Soviet system and reduce the influence of the old caciques of the party.
Millions of Soviets then discovered unprecedented freedoms, but also the shortages, the economic chaos and the nationalist revolts which would sound the death knell of the USSR, which many of his compatriots would never forgive this man with his forehead marked with a stain. of wine.
“Of course I have regrets, big mistakes were made,” he told AFP in January 2011.
Because under his mandate, there was no shortage of excesses: the entry of Soviet tanks into Lithuania, the repression of peaceful demonstrators in Georgia, or the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, passed over in silence for days, contributing to the contamination of hundreds of thousands of people.
– A controversial legacy –
In the West, whether it is the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl or the American President Ronald Reagan, the leaders of the capitalist world are fascinated by this new interlocutor open to negotiation.
“I like Mr. Gorbachev, he’s a man you can deal with,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of him.
Nuclear disarmament agreement, refusal to intervene militarily to defend the Iron Curtain, withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan: the Soviet number one is decidedly different.
This respect will never disappear in the West because of its restraint when the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland crumbled. He will be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
“The most important events of the 20th century were the emancipation of women and the liberation of Russia” by the man nicknamed “Gorbi”, underlined the Israeli leader Shimon Peres, another Nobel laureate.
But for the Russians, Mr. Gorbachev has destroyed the great power status of their homeland, and they have nothing but disdain for this poor orator with a drawling accent from his native region of Stavropol (south).
His fall, moreover, has an air of humiliation.
In June 1991, when Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Soviet Russia by universal suffrage, Mr. Gorbachev tried to save the USSR by proposing greater internal autonomy.
The project fell apart on August 19, 1991, when the hard line of the Communist Party attempted a putsch against him, but it was Mr. Gorbachev’s sworn enemy, Boris Yeltsin, who would be the hero of the resistance to this coup. lack.
Already dying, the USSR disappears in December when Russia, Belarus and Ukraine proclaim that the Soviet Union “no longer exists”. Mikhail Gorbachev resigns on December 25.
“A spontaneous politician who never thought about the consequences, Gorbachev wanted to change everything without changing anything on the merits”, sums up the historian Irina Karatsouba.
“Socialism with a human face fizzled out when oil prices plummeted, and the Cold War was lost. The Gorbachev enigma will long be debated: what did and did not depend on him,” she analyzes.
The only outburst of sympathy that the Russians will have for him is in 1999, after the death of his wife Raissa Gorbacheva from leukemia: contrary to Russian habits, Mikhail Gorbachev never hesitated to publicly show his love for this elegant woman.
– A “positive” leader –
For the writer and photographer Yuri Rost, Mr. Gorbachev was “the most positive leader” of Russia because he sought to make it a country arousing “respect” rather than “fear”.
However, nothing predestined “Gorbi” to this extraordinary destiny.
After growing up in “a bled where there was no electricity or radio”, this combine harvester driver went to Moscow at the age of 19, taking “a train for the first time” to go to university, said -he.
During his law studies, he became involved in the student movement of the Communist Party, the Komsomols. Back in Stavropol, he worked full-time in this organization and made a rapid rise through the local Communist Party structure.
He was then noticed by the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. The latter brought Mikhail Gorbachev to Moscow in 1978 where he joined the Central Committee, the ruling body of the CP, before becoming the last leader of the Soviet Union.
Since he left power, Mr. Gorbachev had become a herald of the environmental cause and had created the Gorbachev Foundation, dedicated to socio-economic studies.
In 1996, he ran for president against Boris Yeltsin, but only won 0.5% of the vote.
Increasingly discreet in recent years as his health declined, he admitted certain wrongs.
A virulent time against Vladimir Putin, saying in 2011 his “shame” to have supported him at the turn of the 2000s, he increasingly directs his criticisms against Westerners from the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 by Russia and multiplies warnings of the advent of a new Cold War.
In February 2019, he denounced in a forum the American decision to withdraw from the INF treaty on intermediate-range weapons, which he had signed with Ronald Reagan in 1987, as a sign of the “desire of the United States to free itself from all constraints in the field of armament (and) to achieve absolute military superiority”.
Before his death, he had not spoken publicly about the massive Kremlin offensive in Ukraine.
