Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, died at the age of 92 after a long illness. He was known as the last leader of the Soviet Union, whose dissolution was announced in 1991.
The Central Clinical Hospital in the Russian capital, Moscow, announced the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, at the age of 92, after a long struggle with illness.
Western leaders mourned Gorbachev, led by the US President, the British Prime Minister and the French President, stressing the importance of his role in shaping the modern world and his role in international peace. The Russian president also expressed his sadness at the departure of the last Soviet leader.
His upbringing and political life
Mikhail Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolno in the North Caucasus, into a Russian-Ukrainian family of peasants who had emigrated from the city of Chernihiv, which is in the north of today's Ukraine. In his teens, he worked as a combine harvester operator, which gave him sufficient knowledge of the problems of food production that were the reason for his entry and distinction within the Communist Party.
In 1955 he graduated from Moscow State University with a law degree, and while he was at the university he joined the Communist Party, and then became active in it. He began to climb the political ladder within the party after he was appointed Party Secretary in the Stavropol Territory in 1970, then was appointed the first secretary of the Supreme Soviet in 1974.
He was appointed as a member of the Politburo in 1979. At the end of the three years following the death of President Leonid Brezhnev, which had been marked by major changes and rearrangements of positions within the party, the Politburo nominated Gorbachev to take over the post of General Secretary of the Soviet Council.
In March 1985, Gorbachev held the position of General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and in February 1990 he proposed abolishing the role of the communist leader and allowing the formation of political parties, in addition to electing a president of the Soviet Union. In March of the same year, the Assembly of People's Deputies approved his appointment as President of the Soviet Union, to be the first and last to hold this position.
The last nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union has been hammered
In a rare interview he gave to a BBC correspondent in Moscow in 2016, Mikhail Gorbachev said the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a "crime and a coup", adding that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 because of "treason". Speaking of the moment when the world changed, the day the Soviet superpower collapsed, Gorbachev said: "What happened to the USSR was dramatic."
By the spring of 1991, Gorbachev was caught between two powerful trends that were narrowing his room for maneuver. On the one hand, the conservatives and reactionaries within the party were trying to reverse his policies, and on the other hand, progressives wanted to create a complete multi-party system and push the country towards reforms of the collapsing economy.
In the wake of the failed coup attempt by a group of Communist Party conservatives who tried to detain him while he was on vacation in Crimea, Mikhail Gorbachev shocked the citizens of the Soviet Union and the world at large when he made a televised speech on the evening of December 25, 1991, in which he submitted his resignation and announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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