Mikhail Gorbachev dead at 91

Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has died, Russian media reported Tuesday. He was 91.

"Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev died this evening after a severe and prolonged illness," Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital said in a statement, according to RIA Novosti and CNN.

Gorbachev, who served as the last leader of the former Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, is credited with bringing an end to the Cold War, as well as lifting the Iron Curtain that divided Europe after World War II. He is also known for introducing a number of radical political and economic reforms (see: "glasnost" and "perestroika") that ending up unintentionally pushing the USSR closer to collapse, The Washington Post reports.

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He will be buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, next to his wife, who died in 1999, Reuters reports.

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Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.