Wed 31 August 2022:
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, passed away at the age of 91.
When Gorbachev assumed office in 1985, he was lauded for his efforts to liberalize the USSR and improve relations with the West, but he was unable to prevent his nation’s collapse in 1991.
According to the hospital where Mr. Gorbachev passed away, he had a prolonged and serious illness.
“This evening, after a serious and prolonged illness, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev passed away,” the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, where he was being treated, said in a statement.
Deeply revered in the West — where he was nicknamed “Gorby” — Gorbachev was in many ways a nemesis to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who built the Iron Curtain, turned most of Eastern Europe into a bloc of Moscow’s satellites and challenged Washington’s political supremacy in a Manichean confrontation that put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Gorbachev was born in 1931 in a peasant family. He made a successful career in the Communist Party and headed the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991.
Gorbachev announced a policy of perestroika, designed as a transition to a more democratic and free country, but which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pivotal role in ending the Cold War.
A famine caused by “collectivisation”, or forced formation of collective farms, decimated the southern Russian village of Privolnoye shortly after Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was born there on March 2, 1931, into a family of Russian and Ukrainian descent.
Both of his grandfathers were arrested and imprisoned during the Great Purge of the 1930s, and their ordeals would later influence his decision to break the Communist Party’s political and ideological monopoly.
Gorbachev started operating a combine harvester at age 15, and his tireless work brought him a government award, a chance to study law at Moscow State University — and the little red ID of a Communist Party member.
Communist Moscow launched the first crewed space flight, nearly started a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis and installed pro-Moscow governments in former European colonies throughout the world.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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