Mikhail Gorbachev Passed Away!

Mikhail Gorbachev has passer away.

The last president of the Soviet Union has passed away. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev passed away at the age of 91. Russian television confirms that the 91-year old former leader and mentor to Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin had a prolong illness.

He was also notable for the unique scar on his head.

The most famous rivalry was Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. The famous Berlin Wall speech which Reagan used the "tear down" as a call to end occupation of East Berlin and East Germany. George H.W. Bush was the president who saw the Soviet Union collapse and he developed a lifelong friendship with the former rival.

West Berlin was a semi-autonomous region surrounded by East Germany. It was considered "Free Germany" or the West.

Gorbachev, who served as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, was a controversial figure in his lifetime.

Celebrated in the West for dismantling the Iron Curtain, he was 0awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for brokering international peace and helping to end the Cold War. In his native Russia, however, Gorbachev was reviled by many for presiding over the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

“I feel like a man who has lived several lives, full of great moments and heavy losses,” Gorbachev 0once said.

Though he expressed regret for some political choices, Gorbachev stood by many of the Cold War decisions that have earned him a place in history.

Perestroika, the program of political and economic reform that he introduced in the USSR in the mid-1980s, was one of his greatest achievements, he 0told The Guardian in a 2011 interview.

“What we were able to achieve within the country and in the international arena was of enormous importance,” he said.  “It predetermined the course of events in ending the Cold War, moving toward a new world order and, in spite of everything, producing gradual movement away from a totalitarian state to a democracy.”

Frenemies.

Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in the southern Russian province of Stavropol to a peasant Ukrainian-Russian family.

His childhood was marked by suffering and terror. In the 1932-33 Soviet famine, nearly half his village starved to death, including members of his own family. Many more in the village were later killed during Joseph Stalin’s purges. In 1937, one of Gorbachev’s grandfathers was captured and tortured. “They tried to break his arms,” Gorbachev 0remembered. “They tried to blind him.”

Still, for all the hardship, Gorbachev was remembered by his classmates and teachers as a bright and popular child who enjoyed singing and dancing. As a teen, he helped his father operate combine harvesters on collective farms.

He was one of “best looking guys in the village,” his childhood friend, Alexander Yakovenko, remembered in “A Man Who Changed The World,” a documentary about Gorbachev’s life.

After decades of Cold War tension and confrontation, Gorbachev brought the Soviet Union closer to the West than at any point since World War II.

"He gave freedom to hundreds of millions of people in Russia and around it, and also half of Europe," said former Russian liberal opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky. "Few leaders in history have had such a decisive influence on their time."

Bush and Gorbachev had a lifelong friendship.

But Gorbachev saw his legacy wrecked late in life, as the invasion of Ukraine brought Western sanctions crashing down on Moscow, and politicians in both Russia and the West began to speak of a new Cold War.

"Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life's work, freedom, was effectively destroyed by Putin," said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He will be buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, said Tass, citing the foundation that the ex-Soviet leader set up once he left office.

"We are all orphans now. But not everyone realizes it," said Alexei Venediktov, head of a liberal media radio outlet that closed down after coming under pressure over its coverage of the Ukraine war.

When pro-democracy protests rocked Soviet bloc nations in communist Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev refrained from using force - unlike previous Kremlin leaders who had sent tanks to crush uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, forged arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War Two and bring about the reunification of Germany.

But his internal reforms helped weaken the Soviet Union to the point where it fell apart, a moment that  Putin has called the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the twentieth century.

Putin felt Gorbachev gave away the power.

"Mikhail Gorbachev passed away tonight after a serious and protracted disease," said Russia's Central Clinical Hospital.

Putin expressed "his deepest condolences", Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Interfax. "Tomorrow he will send a telegram of condolences to his family and friends," he said.

Putin said in 2018 he would reverse the Soviet Union's disintegration if he could, news agencies reported.

World leaders were quick to pay tribute. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said Gorbachev, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, had opened the way for a free Europe.

President Joe Biden said he had believed in "glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, citing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, said Gorbachev's "tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all".