Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s final leader, dies

Mikhail Gorbachev, who avoided violence to end the Cold War but was unable to save the fall of the Soviet Union, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 91, according to hospital officials in Moscow.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, worked to bring about the reunification of Germany by negotiating armaments reduction agreements with the United States and forming alliances with Western nations.

However, his internal changes contributed to the Soviet Union's decline until its dissolution, which President Vladimir Putin has dubbed the "biggest geopolitical calamity" of the 20th century.

World leaders were quick to express their admiration for the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
Gorbachev pushed the Soviet Union closer to the West than at any time since World War Two, ending decades of Cold War hostility and conflict.

Late in his life, however, when Western sanctions against Moscow were imposed following the invasion of Ukraine and politicians in both Russia and the West started to discuss a potential new Cold War, Gorbachev saw his legacy destroyed.

He will rest with his late wife Raisa, who passed away in 1999, in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.

Gorbachev, in contrast to earlier Kremlin leaders who had dispatched tanks to put down demonstrations in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, refrained from employing force when pro-democracy movements shook Soviet bloc countries in communist Eastern Europe in 1989.