Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the founder of perestroika, has died aged 91, Russian media reported on Tuesday.
The last Soviet leader spent a good part of his life in the shadows, in political oblivion in Russia. After losing power in December 1991 following the implosion of the Soviet Union, he tried to persuade his compatriots that he had neither sought nor triggered the collapse of the huge state he once ruled.
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The Russians resent their former president for destroying the Soviet Union and its empire when he needed to reform it. Gorbachev argued that only a broad program of political and economic renewal might have offered the prospect of preserving the Soviet system. This is why he introduced perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (opening).
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These initiatives might have worked, he thought, if they had not been undermined from within, particularly by the mayor of Moscow, future President Boris Yeltsin, who had pushed for more radical reforms and found himself at the head of Russia, most of the former Soviet Union.
