"Mikhail Gorbachev passed away tonight after a serious and protracted disease," Russia's Central Clinical Hospital said in a statement on Tuesday, as cited by the Reuters news agency.
Gorbachev's reforms
Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, at the age of 54, and undertook to revitalise the Soviet system through limited political and economic freedoms, known as perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness or free speech).
However, his reforms spun out of control, Reuters reported, noting that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost allowed previously unthinkable criticism of the party and the state, but also emboldened nationalists who began to press for independence in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere.
Notably, when pro-democracy protests erupted across the Soviet bloc nations of communist Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev refrained from using force, in contrast to previous Kremlin leaders, who had brutally crushed uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
But the protests fuelled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated over the next two years in chaotic fashion, Reuters said.
Biden leads tributes
US President Joe Biden has led tributes to Gorbachev, describing him as “a man of remarkable vision.”
Referring to the last Soviet leader’s reforms, and his work for nuclear disarmament, Biden said that Gorbachev was “a rare leader – one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it.”
“The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people,” the US president added.
Gorbachev gave people 'hope for a more dignified life': Polish FM
Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau tweeted that Gorbachev "increased the scope of freedom of the enslaved peoples of the Soviet Union in an unprecedented way, giving them hope for a more dignified life."
'The man who consigned the Soviet Union to history'
Meanwhile, Łukasz Jasina, the spokesman for Poland’s foreign ministry, said on Twitter that Gorbachev “will be remembered as the man who consigned the Soviet Union to history, even though he wanted to save it.”
“Let us remember this, especially now, when there are those who dream of a return to the imperial past,” Jasina tweeted.
Gorbachev, who was awarded the Peace Nobel Prize in 1990, will be buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, Reuters reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, Reuters, whitehouse.gov
Click on the audio player above to listen to a report by Elżbieta Krajewska.