“Today in the evening (Tuesday), after a long serious illness, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev died,” said the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB) dependent on the Russian presidency.
Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the East-West confrontation in the last century, Mikhail Gorbachev has spent the last 20 years in withdrawal from politics while regularly making his voice heard, worried about new tensions with Washington .
He regularly called on the Kremlin and the White House to talk, meet and agree to ensure global security and reduce their arsenals, as he did in the 1980s with then-US President Ronald Reagan.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the last living leader of the Cold War era, a period whose echoes have been particularly felt since current Russian President Vladimir Putin’s large-scale offensive in Ukraine, launched on February 24.
Before his death, Mikhail Gorbachev had not spoken publicly about this conflict of unprecedented violence in Europe since the Second World War, decried in the West as a resurgence of Russian imperialism.
In recent weeks, the Russian media had mentioned the former leader’s recurring health problems.
Highly respected abroad, Mr. Gorbachev regularly received praise from personalities around the world, as in March 2021, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, when American President Joe Biden or German Chancellor Angela Merkel thought of congratulate him.
In Russia, on the other hand, since the disappearance of the USSR in 1991, he remained an ambivalent figure. If he was the one who gave freedom of expression a chance to emerge, he was largely responsible for the breakup of a superpower and the terrible years of economic shock that followed – a humiliation.
During his time in power between 1985 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev carried out important democratic reforms, known as “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (transparency), which earned him immense popularity in the West. .
In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “having peacefully ended the Cold War”. He is also the one who ordered the end of the disastrous Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan and let the Berlin Wall fall.
– Controversial inheritance in Russia –
The years that followed the dissolution of the USSR remain a trauma for many Russians, plunged into fulgurating poverty, confronted with political chaos and a bloody war in Chechnya.
With the coming to power in 2000 of Vladimir Putin, who said he considered the disappearance of the USSR as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, the state brought society into line while ensuring the return of power Russian on the international stage.
For Mikhail Gorbachev, relations have always been complex with the new masters of the Kremlin, whether it was the first Russian president Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), his sworn enemy, or Vladimir Putin, whom he criticized while seeing in him a chance for stable development of Russia.
After a brief failed attempt to return to politics in the 1990s, Mr. Gorbachev devoted himself entirely to educational and humanitarian projects. He was also an early supporter of the main Russian opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.
Born in southwestern Russia in 1931, Mikhail Gorbachev had spent part of the Covid-19 pandemic in a Russian hospital, saying to himself, like many of his compatriots, “tired of it all”.
