Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the city of Stavropol, and was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 and 1991 during the Soviet collapse.
The Russian news agencies TASS, RIA Novosti and Interfax were given this information by the Central Medical Hospital.
The former Soviet leader will be buried next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. The TASS agency provided this information citing a family source.
In 1989, he experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and failed to control the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which would end in 1991. Gorbachev would later be succeeded by Boris Yeltsin.
Inaugurated in the Soviet Union, ‘Klasnost’ led to a wave of criticism within the Communist Party and from nationalists who began demanding independence for the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Aiming to revitalize the Soviet system through further economic reforms, Gorbachev saw the political situation spiraling out of control.
On June 30, liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg visited the former Soviet leader in hospital and declared, “He gave us freedom – but we don’t know how to live with it.”
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