“Vladimir Putin expresses his deep condolences for the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, he will send a telegram of condolences to the family and relatives of the former leader”Dmitri Peskov said according to the TASS news agency.
Cheered in the West as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War without bloodshed, Mikhail Gorbachev was greatly despised in his country where he was considered the gravedigger of the communist Soviet Union.
The former Soviet president, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, set out to revitalize the sclerotic communist system through democratic and economic reforms, but his intention was never to abolish it.
However, it unleashed forces beyond its control and found itself occupying a shrinking space between stalwarts of centralized power and separatists determined to dismantle it.
In August 1991, he survived a coup by hardliners that collapsed within three days, but his authority was fatally undermined. Four months later, his great rival, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, organized the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev was out of a job.
“In this sense, I think Gorbachev is a tragic figure, similar in many ways to Shakespeare’s King Lear,” said Valery Solovei, close to Gorbachev’s inner circle in the 1980s and an ally after his downfall. “He is about a man who ruled a superpower, but at the end of his reign, the state was gone.”
After decades of tension and confrontation during the Cold War, Gorbachev reached agreements on nuclear weapons with the United States and brought the Soviet Union closer to the West than ever since before World War II.
However, he saw that legacy shattered in the last months of his long life, when President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine brought Western sanctions down on Moscow, and politicians in both Russia and the West began to speak openly of a new Cold War and the risk of a Third World War.
Source: Ambito
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