Former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev is dead

Mikhail Gorbachev, in November 2014. AFP PHOTO / ODD ANDERSEN

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Former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev has died at the age of 91, Russian news agencies said on Tuesday, citing hospital officials. 

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A major political figure of the 20th century, Mikhail Gorbachev died on Tuesday August 30 at the age of 91.

" 

 ," said the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB) dependent on the Russian presidency.

Last secretary general of the central committee of the USSR, then first and last president of the USSR, he spent six years in the Kremlin, from 1985 to 1991. Six years, during which the face of his country and a good part of Europe found itself profoundly upset.

Seen in the West as a reformer who gave the Soviets back their freedoms, Gorbachev remained a very controversial figure in Russia until his death, where many consider him, above all, as the gravedigger of the USSR.

Mikhail Gorbachev, an advocate of arms control and democracy-oriented reforms in the 1980s, was widely

, but criticized for the outbreak, deemed by his Russian critics unnecessary and painful, of the Soviet Union in 1991.

With Mikhail Gorbachev, the Western vocabulary was enriched with two Russian words: "perestroika" and "glasnost", two terms which symbolize the reform policy he initiated, opening the door to the upheavals of the early 1990s, which led the Soviet system to its downfall.

(More information to follow...)

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