Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91

News organisations quoted a statement from the Central Clinical Hospital as saying he died after a long illness. No other details were given.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies that President Vladimir Putin offered deep condolences over Mr Gorbachev’s death and would send an official telegram to his family in the morning.

Though in power less than seven years, Mr Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes, but they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of eastern European nations from Russian domination and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.

His power sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on Christmas Day 1991.

The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later.

A quarter of a century after the collapse, Mr Gorbachev told the Associated Press he had not considered using widespread force to try to keep the USSR together because he feared chaos in a nuclear country.

“The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And it would have immediately pushed the country into a civil war,” he said.

Many of the changes, including the Soviet break-up, bore no resemblance to the transformation he had envisioned when he became the Soviet leader in March 1985.

By the end of his rule he was powerless to halt the whirlwind he had sown, but he may have had a greater impact on the second half of the 20th century than any other political figure.

“I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” he said shortly after he left office.

“I am often asked, would I have started it all again if I had to repeat it? Yes, indeed. And with more persistence and determination,” he said.

Mr Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War and spent his later years collecting accolades and awards from all corners of the world, but he was widely despised at home.

Russians blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union — a once-fearsome superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate nations. His former allies deserted him and made him a scapegoat for the country’s troubles.

Soon after taking power, Mr Gorbachev began a campaign to end his country’s economic and political stagnation, using “glasnost” – or openness – to help achieve his goal of “perestroika”, or restructuring.

In his memoirs, he said he had long been frustrated that in a country with immense natural resources, tens of millions were living in poverty.

“Our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system,” he wrote. “Doomed to serve ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost.”

Once he began, one move led to another. He freed political prisoners, allowed open debate and multi-candidate elections, gave his countrymen freedom to travel, halted religious oppression, reduced nuclear arsenals, established closer ties with the West and did not resist the fall of communist regimes in eastern European satellite states.

But the forces he unleashed quickly escaped his control.

Long-suppressed ethnic tensions flared, sparking wars and unrest in trouble spots such as the southern Caucasus region. Strikes and labour unrest followed price increases and shortages of consumer goods.

In one of the low points of his tenure, Mr Gorbachev sanctioned a crackdown on the restive Baltic republics in early 1991.

The violence turned many intellectuals and reformers against him. Competitive elections also produced a new crop of populist politicians who challenged his policies and authority.

Chief among them was his former protege and eventual nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, who became Russia’s first president.

“The process of renovating this country and bringing about fundamental changes in the international community proved to be much more complex than originally anticipated,” Mr Gorbachev told the nation as he stepped down.

“However, let us acknowledge what has been achieved so far. Society has acquired freedom; it has been freed politically and spiritually. And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully come to grips with in part because we still have not learned how to use our freedom.”

Although the rest of the world benefited from the changes Mr Gorbachev wrought, the Soviet economy collapsed in the process, bringing with it tremendous economic hardship for the country’s 290 million people.

In the final days of the Soviet Union, the economic decline accelerated into a steep skid. Hyper-inflation robbed most older people of their life’s savings, factories shut down, and bread lines formed.

Popular hatred for Mr Gorbachev and his wife Raisa grew, but the couple won sympathy in summer 1999 when it was revealed that Mrs Gorbachev was dying of leukaemia.

Mr Gorbachev has veered between criticism and mild praise for Mr Putin, who has been criticised for backtracking on the democratic achievements of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras.

He said Mr Putin had done much to restore stability and prestige to Russia after the tumultuous decade following the Soviet collapse, but he protested over growing limitations on media freedom, and in 2006 bought one of Russia’s last investigative newspapers, Novaya Gazeta, with a businessman associate.

He ventured into other new areas in his 70s, winning awards and kudos around the world. He won a Grammy in 2004 along with former US President Bill Clinton and Italian actress Sophia Loren for their recording of Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf, and the United Nations named him a Champion of the Earth in 2006 for his environmental advocacy.

Mr Gorbachev had a daughter Irina and two granddaughters.

The official news agency Tass reported that Gorbachev will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife.