Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader responsible for ending the Cold War without bloodshed, died today at the age of 91, the Russian news agency Interfax reported. Confirmed by Bilgi Central Clinical Hospital.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev died tonight after a serious and long illness. To the Central Clinical Hospital website

Gorbachev led the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) between 1985 and 1991 as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and later President of the USSR. After the signing of the Belovezhskaya Accords in December 1991, he announced the end of his activities as chairman.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation as president of the USSR on December 25, 1991 marked the end of the Soviet empire, which Putin called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”.

Gorbachev forged arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to lift the Iron Curtain that has divided Europe since WWII and achieve German reunification.

When pro-democracy protests swept through the Soviet bloc countries of communist eastern Europe in 1989, he refrained from using force, unlike previous Kremlin leaders who sent tanks to suppress uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

But the protests fueled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, which chaotically disintegrated over the next two years.

Gorbachev tried in vain to prevent this collapse.

When he became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, at the age of 54, he began to revive the system by introducing limited political and economic freedoms, but his reforms got out of hand.

The policy of ‘glasnost’ – freedom of expression – has allowed unthinkable criticism to rage in the Baltic republics in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere.

Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turmoil his reforms unleashed, seeing the subsequent decline in living standards as an unaffordable price for democracy.

After visiting Gorbachev in hospital on June 30, liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces newspaper Zvezda: “He gave us all the freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it.”

With information from Reuters