The last years of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s life were marked by health problems, as well as criticism of Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin. The last president of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) died this Tuesday (30) at the age of 91.
“Today [terça-feira] According to Russian news agencies, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev died in the evening after a long and serious illness at the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB).
According to the Interfax news agency, Gorbachev was hospitalized at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak at the request of his doctors and has been under surveillance ever since. According to the British Daily Mail, the former Soviet leader had suffered from kidney problems for many years and was on dialysis as a result.
In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2011, Gorbachev revealed that he had three surgeries in a five-year period between the late 2000s and early 2010s. “It was pretty tough because it was all big: first the carotid, then the prostate, and this year my spine.”
Gorbachev, who was hospitalized during the pandemic, continued to give interviews and commentary on global issues until the end of his life.
Criticism of Putin
Russian journalist Alexei Venicetov, who was in contact with Gorbachev, said in a report published in the Daily Mail in July this year that he was horrified to see the former head of the USSR ‘destroyed’ by Putin as Russia collapsed. military aggression
Although Gorbachev does not speak openly about the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Venicetov said, “I can say he is sorry. Of course he understands that. […] It was his life’s work.”
Venicetov was the editor of the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echos of Moscow), which announced in March this year that it was shutting down due to pressure on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mikhail Gorbachev, in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2011, said that he “supported Putin during his presidency and defended him in many ways today”. “What worries me is what Putin’s United Russia party and government are doing.” “They want to preserve the status quo. No progress. On the contrary, they are pulling us into the past when the country urgently needs modernisation.”
Image: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images – May 9, 2019
former soviet leader
Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 to a peasant family in the Stavropol region of southern Russia.
Gorbachev led the USSR as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) from 1985 to 1991 and later as President of the USSR.
Gorbachev initiated reforms to achieve “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring), unleashing the forces that led to the dissolution and fall of the USSR.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation as president of the USSR on December 25, 1991 marked the end of the Soviet empire, which Vladimir Putin called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”.
In an article published in 2016, Gorbachev acknowledged his share of responsibility for the collapse of the Soviet world. “But my conscience is clear,” he wrote in a Russian newspaper. “I defended the Union to the end by political means.”
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the conflict between East and West in the last century. He has traveled the world giving speeches, supporting environmental causes, and running fundraising campaigns for his foundation.
In 1996, in the elections won by Boris Yeltsin, he won only 0.5% of the vote and became a candidate for the presidency of Russia. However, he maintained some influence through the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, of which he was one of the owners.
Over the years he has reduced his public appearances, but has continued to defend the causes he has defended all his life.
This was very clear when Donald Trump announced in 2018 that the United States would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Gorbachev negotiated with then-US President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
“The great danger … stands above everything we have achieved in the years since the end of the Cold War,” he wrote in the newspaper Vedomosti. However, he remained hopeful. “The key to solving security problems is politics, not weapons,” Gorbachev said. said.
In late 2021, months before Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year, Gorbachev lamented NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) expansionism and said that the ‘arrogant’ US was ‘building a new empire’.
source: Noticias
