Gorbachev dies aged 91
Gorbachev found himself in the shrinking middle ground of Russian politics at the Cold War’s bitter end
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, the leader of the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1991, has died in a Moscow hospital aged 91, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported last night.
The agency said that Gorbachev, regarded as one of the most significant statesmen of the 20th century, had died of a “serious and prolonged illness” at the Central Clinic Hospital.
It did not give any more details, but Gorbachev was said to be gravely ill earlier this year with a kidney ailment.
Loved by the West and despised by hardliners within the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, Gorbachev is credited with helping to end the Cold War.
In 1990, he won the Nobel Peace Prize “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-west relations”.
The charming and modernising Gorbachev was voted in as Communist Party general secretary in 1985, the de facto head of the Soviet Union when its leadership had been in disarray since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982.
He was the architect of freedoms for many people living in the Soviet Union, but also relaxed control of the authorities that was later blamed for the collapse of the Communist system.
The Soviet Union into which he tried to breathe new life with his liberal reforms, perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness), broke in 1991. Gorbachev
was the target of a failed hardline coup. By the end of the year, he had resigned in favour of Boris Yeltsin.
Margaret Thatcher emerged as his most passionate Western supporter and champion of his efforts for reform.
What Thatcher liked about him was that they could argue together, sometimes ferociously, sometimes, as he once put it, “until we were red in the face”.
Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, were reported to have mistrusted each other. Mr Putin blamed Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev considered Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February a betrayal.
Last night, Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, said: “President Putin expresses his deep sympathies over the death of Mikhail Gorbachev. In the morning he will send a telegram of condolences to his family and friends.”
Boris Johnson said: “I’m saddened to hear of the death of Gorbachev. I always admired the courage and integrity he showed in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. In a time of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, his tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all.”
Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, said: “Mikhail Gorbachev’s reported death... is a reminder of how far Russia has fallen. From a powerful, if tyrannical, state to now the playpen of gangsters and war criminals.”
‘Mikhail Gorbachev’s death is a reminder of how far Russia has fallen … to the playpen of gangsters’
LAUDED in the West as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War without bloodshed, Mikhail Gorbachev was widely despised at home as the Soviet Union’s gravedigger.
Its former leader, who died yesterday aged 91, set out to revitalise the sclerotic Communist system through democratic and economic reform; it was never his intention to abolish it.
But he unleashed forces beyond his control, and found himself occupying a shrinking middle ground between diehards intent on preserving centralised power and separatists set on dismantling it. When he became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, he inherited a poisoned chalice.
The Soviet Union was entangled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, the confrontation with the West was at its worst since the Cuban missile crisis, and the domestic economy was struggling after decades of what is now known as the “era of stagnation”.
He decided on a series of bold moves at home and abroad to save the country; they would win him accolades in the West as a peacemaker, but the lasting resentment of many at home who blamed him for the Soviet collapse.
By November that year, he had overcome enough opposition to organise the first of a series of summits with Ronald Reagan: a symbolic but historic move that signalled a determination to engage rather than confront the West.
The Geneva summit was no breakthrough. Both the Americans and the Soviets went home frustrated with the other side’s obstinacy. Nonetheless, the men built a rapport and it opened the path to a series of serious discussions about nuclear arms control and trust building that helped end the Cold War.
Gorbachev had been at the helm of the Soviet Union for just over a year when he faced his worst domestic crisis.
In April 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded, spewing radioactive waste across swathes of the Soviet Union and Western Europe.
For many Soviet citizens, Chernobyl – and the bungled attempts at a coverup by officials – destroyed the last vestiges of faith in the crumbling institutions of the Communist regime.
Gorbachev, who was initially fed misleadingly optimistic reports by officials, was no exception. He soon addressed the nation to argue that the disaster showed exactly why the Soviet Union needed reform, and became increasingly outspoken in his criticisms of the system from then on.
He has not escaped criticism for his own role in that crisis. But he later said it brought home to him the sheer depths of the culture of incompetence and cover-up, and lent added impetus to his policies of perestroika – economic reform – and glasnost – openness.
They would come to define an era of rapid economic and political change that would culminate in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By 1989, things were moving rapidly. In summer, Gorbachev withdrew from Afghanistan, finally ending a bloody, expensive and pointless adventure that had done as much as Chernobyl to undermine faith in the system.
It was the only possible thing to do, and it was much more orderly than the US withdrawal three decades later. But there was no hiding that the march of the last Soviet troops across the Friendship Bridge in Afghanistan marked the retreat of a once invincible super power.
At the same time, rumbling discontent in the Soviet Union’s Communist satellite states in eastern and Central Europe came to a head. In Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, uprisings unseated Communist governments. In November, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and the Cold War was over.
In 1956 and 1968, Gorbachev’s predecessors had sent in the Red Army to crush such uprisings. But he refused to. It was possibly his most important decision, and it was not without a backlash.
In December 1989, a young KGB officer found himself facing down a hostile German crowd in Dresden.
Calling for help from a nearby army base, he was told to his horror that “Moscow is silent”. That officer was Vladimir Putin, whose efforts to reverse that trauma culminated in this year’s invasion of Ukraine.
Gorbachev had ended the Cold War. But traditionalists were appalled.
In August 1991, a cabal of KGB hardliners decided enough was enough. Gorbachev was effectively detained in his dacha in Crimea while tanks rolled on to the streets of Moscow.
Like Chernobyl, the August coup epitomised incompetence. The conspirators had no clear plan. And when the people of Moscow protested, the whole thing quickly fell apart.
But it was Boris Yeltsin, the energetic young leader of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, who led the public showdown against the hardliners in Moscow. Gorbachev, cut off from the world, was invisible and the event ended his political career.
By the time he was freed from house arrest, real power now lay not with the party, but with the Soviet Republics: above all Russia, led by Yeltsin.
In November, Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich and Leonid Kravchuk, his Belarusian and Ukrainian counterparts, agreed that the Soviet Union “as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality ceases its existence”.
Gorbachev would complain Yeltsin kept the plans for that meeting secret from him. By new year, his job – and the country he had risen to rule - had ceased to exist.