The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, died Tuesday at the age of 91 in Russia, said a hospital quoted by Russian news agencies.
Coming to power in 1985, he launched a wave of political and economic reforms aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union, which was facing serious crises.
Supporter of a policy of rapprochement with the West, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
Between 1990 and 1991, he served as President of the Soviet Union, before finally having to resign on December 25, 1991, which led to the end of the USSR.
Here is the life, in pictures, of the man who helped end the Cold War.
Directed by:
Olivier JUSZCZAK
Mikhail Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in the small village of Privolnoïe, near Stavropol, into a family of farmers.
A brilliant high school student, he enrolled at the Faculty of Moscow to study law at the beginning of the summer of 1950.
He joins the Soviet Communist Party and takes the head of the youth section at the university.
It is also the period when he meets Raïssa, whom he will marry at the age of 22.
In 1970, he became governor of the Stavropol region before returning to Moscow in 1978 to take charge of the country's agricultural sector and get closer to the Politburo.
On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, was elected head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and became the country's number one.
In October 1985, he presented a plan for economic and political restructuring (perestroika) which was to fail.
On the other hand, its plan of openness (glasnost) aimed at freeing the press and lifting taboos on certain subjects of the past will be a success.
Millions of Soviets then discovered unprecedented freedoms, but also the shortages, the economic chaos and the nationalist revolts which would sound the death knell of the USSR, which many of his compatriots would never forgive this man with his forehead marked with a stain. of wine.
Because under his mandate, the excesses have not been lacking.
The entry of Soviet tanks into Lithuania, the repression of peaceful demonstrators in Georgia, or the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, passed over in silence for days, contributing to the contamination of hundreds of thousands of people.
However, in the West, the leaders of the capitalist world are fascinated by this new interlocutor open to negotiation.
On December 8, 1987, he signed the INF (medium-range missile) elimination treaty in Washington during the third summit with US President Ronald Reagan.
In May 1989, during a summit in Beijing with the Chinese number one Deng Xiaoping, he sealed normalization after 30 years of estrangement with China.
At the same time, students stand in front of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Nuclear disarmament agreement, refusal to intervene militarily to defend the Iron Curtain, withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan: the Soviet number one is decidedly different.
This respect will never disappear in the West because of its restraint when the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland crumbled.
On December 1, 1989, he met Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.
Another historic moment.
He was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War.
On March 15, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected President of the USSR for five years, a newly created post.
In June 1991, when Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Soviet Russia by universal suffrage, Mr. Gorbachev tried to save the USSR by proposing greater internal autonomy.
The project collapsed on August 19, 1991, when the hard line Communist Party attempted a putsch against him.
Already dying, the USSR disappeared in December when Russia, Belarus and Ukraine proclaimed that the Soviet Union “no longer exists”.
Mikhail Gorbachev resigns on December 25.
In 1999, his wife Raïssa died of leukemia.
Mikhail Gorbachev is inconsolable.
Contrary to Russian customs, he never hesitated to publicly show his love for his wife.
Increasingly discreet in recent years as his health declined, he admitted certain wrongs.
Before his death, he had not spoken publicly about the massive Kremlin offensive in Ukraine.
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