Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and former president of the USSR, has died at the age of 91.
A supporter of a policy of rapprochement with the West, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1990, he was one of the major protagonists of world politics in the 80s, leading the USSR between 1985 and 1991: he negotiated the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and nuclear disarmament.
Between 1990 and 1991 he was President of the Soviet Union, before having to resign definitively on December 25, 1991, with the end of the USSR. He was the symbol of a new generation of leaders: it was he who started Glasnost (transparency) and then Perestroika (economic restructuring), which saw the birth of modern Russia.
He tried to change the Soviet Union and its relations with the Western world. And he did not just want the end of the Cold War or a return to the policy of détente, but to create real cooperation, an understanding between East and West: he defended multilateralism that was not yet globalized, aware that the worst danger was that of a nuclear war but also of environmental challenges, which he will be one of the first political leaders to put on the agenda.
Its achievements were significant: the end of the occupation of Afghanistan, the signing of an agreement on Euromissiles, the “option 0″ which completely eliminates a category of nuclear weapons, the agreement on conventional disarmament, but also the fact that each Eastern European country could follow its own path: the USSR no longer imposed its policy by force, as demonstrated by the German reunification that Gorbachev accepted when there were still 500 Soviet soldiers in East Germany.
After resigning from his post as president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev turned to ecology. In twenty years he wrote My Manifesto for the Earth and participated in several documentaries on the subject – The Battle of Chernobyl in 2006,
The Eleventh Hour, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio in 2007, or We Will Stay on Earth in 2009. But his most notable legacy in this sector is Green Cross International, founded in April 1993 with the Swiss deputy Roland Wiederhehr: an ecological NGO modeled on the Red Cross aims to ensure "a sustainable future for all the peoples of the world". To do this, Gorbachev hopes for a "perestroika of sustainable development", as he indicated on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the NGO.
According to the Tass agency, which reported the death, Gorbachev, who died in a Moscow hospital, will be buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in the Russian capital, where the remains of prominent figures in the country's history lie, but where the remains of Gorbachev's wife, Raissa, also rest. Gorbachev had been living away from the media spotlight for years due to health problems.
Article published on 30 August 2022 - 23:39
