Mikhail Gorbachev, last president of the USSR, dies at 91

The last president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and father of the perestroika, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, has died this Tuesday in Moscow at the age of 91. “This afternoon, after a long and serious illness, Mikhail Gorbachev passed away”; sources from the Central Clinical Hospital told the agency RIA Novosti.

But to tell the Gorbachev story, you have to start at the beginning. He was born on March 2, 1931 in Privólnoye, into a peasant family from a small town in the North Caucasus. His family wanted to have called him Viktorwhich in Greek means “the victor”, but the pope who baptized him (the Orthodox Christian priest) introduced him to the world as Mikhail, which translated from Hebrew means “equal to God”.

Mijaíl (or Misha, as he was called back then), was a rambunctious, curious and stubborn boy. But he was also a child who was very interested in reading. “He read with relish everything that fell into his hands,” according to the journalist Francis Herranz in his book ‘Gorbachev, lights and shadows of a comrade‘. At just 13 years old, she “began to identify success in life with reading and reflection, and also with displaying his leadership skills.”

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He was the first prominent political figure in Soviet history to spend his youth in a town and in the countryside before making a career in the Communist Party, as Herranz explains in his work. He became secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, when he was 54 years old.and had set out to revitalize the system by introducing limited political and economic reforms, but those reforms backfired.

Miahil Gorbachev was the president who ended the Cold War without any bloodshed, but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under his mandate, the USSR signed arms reduction agreements with the United States (US) and forged alliances with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War II.

The path taken by Gorbachev through the perestroika it was instrumental in achieving milestones such as the reunification of Germany.

The first reference to the need for “radical reform” not merely cosmetic occurred during the XXVII Congress of the CPSU, held in February 1986. And in July of that same year he matched his famous perestroika with the authentic revolution: “The perestroika it is a revolutionary process because it is a leap forward in the development of socialism, in the realization of its characteristics,” he said then.

He was a politician who “accommodated his message to the audience (…). He established the premise that cultural change should be executed faster than political and economic organization,” Herranz says in his book. Gorbachev’s goal was for the USSR to “enter the 21st century as a great power.”

In this sense, Gorbachev was a politician ahead of his time. since it proclaimed the “interdependence of the international community, the communion of interests with the United States and the transcendental threats to human interests: nuclear competitiveness, the militarization of international relations, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, poverty in the third world and environmental catastrophes”.

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He considered that the violence “contained a potentially threatening charge that provoked shock waves that were difficult to control. His thesis was that international relations should not be based on intimidation but on mutual security.”

That is why at the Washington summit in 1987, the Soviet leader made major concessions to Ronald Reagan to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement. He made him an offer that the American president could not refuse, and that is that the Soviets promised to reduce twice the number of missiles than the Americans; thus eliminating the image of “enemy” that had been generated around the USSR.

Collapse of the USSR

These concessions were also carried out in his own country. So when pro-democracy protests swept through the Soviet-bloc nations of communist Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev refrained from resorting to the use of force. Unlike previous Kremlin leaders, who sent tanks to crush the Hungarian riots of 1956 and the Czechoslovak riots of 1968.

But those 1989 protests fueled aspirations for independence in the 15 republics that made up the Soviet Union., which disintegrated in the following two years in an absolutely chaotic way. Gorbachev fought in vain to prevent the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

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His policy of ‘glasnot’ (the Russian term for freedom of expression) allowed to criticize the party and the State, something that had never happened on Soviet territory. And that also emboldened the nationalists, who began to push for independence in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, etc.

Shadows in his legacy

Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, the turbulence that unleashed his reforms. And they considered (and still consider) that the fall in the standard of living that occurred after that economic remodeling was too high a price to pay in exchange for the arrival of democracy.

According to the news agency TASS, Gorbachev will be buried in the Moscow cemetery of the Novodevichy Monasterywhere the tomb of his wife, Raísa Maximovna, is located, and where the remains of prominent figures in Russian history lie.

The Russian media point out that the former Soviet leader had been living away from the media spotlight for years due to health problems. Some even go so far as to say that he spent months hospitalized because he suffered from various conditions.

On June 30, Gorbachev received a visit from the Russian economist at the hospital. Ruslan Grinberg and when he came out he declared to Zvezdaa means of communication of the Armed Forces, the following: “He gave us all the freedom, but we didn’t know what to do with it”.