He was the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Then he was also elected president of the USSR. Thanks (also) to him, in 1989 the Berlin Wall was demolished. And the regime has imploded, giving freedom to all the countries of Eastern Europe

Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at 91 on 30 August Photo Video

Mikhail Gorbačëv, the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, later also elected president of the USSR, who died yesterday at the age of 91, is the political leader who with his reforms triggered a series of revolutions which in 1989 led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Europe was at the time divided into two opposing ideological blocs: from Gorizia to the Baltic Sea, an iron curtain separated the NATO countries from the Communist ones. And between the two blocs, a growing deployment of nuclear missiles had repeatedly raised concerns about a new world war - Photo | video 1 | video 2 | video 3 | video 4

The announcement of Gorbachev's death - guard

REFORMS - Elected in 1985 to the top of the Soviet Communist Party, the single party of the USSR, Gorbachev managed to stop this military escalation, signing with the American President Ronald Reagan in 1987 a treaty for mutual disarmament and the dismantling of nuclear warheads stationed in the territory European. At the same time, the Russian leader internally inaugurated a reform program that can be summarized in two now famous words: volume' , transparency, e perestrojka , renovation. Transparency was necessary to be able to discuss the state of serious economic crisis facing the Soviet Union, in an attempt to find ways out. With censorship and propaganda, the elite of the Communist Party had hitherto tried to hide the problems of the USSR. But speaking freely also meant putting an end to the repression of all critical and dissenting voices, and allowing a public debate on any topic: on the horrors of Stalinism as well as on corruption and the privileges of the political class.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE REGIME - When the regime lost control over public opinion, newspapers, rallies in theaters and squares (which at the time replaced social media) it was no longer possible to put a stop to the requests for freedom that came from millions of people in all republics of the USSR. Freedom of political representation, for example, with the end of the one-party system, but also freedom of self-determination, with the awakening of national identities that had merged into the Soviet Union. From Moscow to Vilnius, Budapest, Leipzig, Prague, Bucharest and Tirana: example set the standard, the aspiration for freedom spread, and everywhere the communist regimes fell or were overthrown by riots.

Mikahil Gorbachev, his life in pictures - guard

THE NOBEL FOR PEACE - The other part of Gorbachev's reform program, the one that provided for economic restructuring ( perestrojka ) of state-owned companies, with the opening towards forms of free market, meanwhile struggled, producing more and more discontent and anger in the population. In 1990 Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize, but the following year he was expelled from the Kremlin after a failed coup, which was followed by the ouster of the Soviet Communist Party from power and the disintegration of the USSR.

THE HATE OF THE RUSSIANS - The decade that followed, under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, was the collective trauma that transformed Gorbachev into the politician most hated by the Russians, the traitor who had sold off the Great Russian nation for an American pizza (here the commercial that the Pizza chain Hut filmed in 1997 with the former Russian president), reducing it to a land of plunder for multinationals, speculators and traffickers of all kinds. Life expectancy in post-Soviet Russia plummeted to Third World levels, shop counters emptied, basic necessities such as sugar and flour returned to being rationed, and hunger, misery and crime spread: it was then that democracy became a dirty word. After the chaos of the 1990s, a real shock for more than a generation, it would have been up to Vladimir Putin to put the country back on its feet. But even those hopes have been disappointed, and today the world and Europe find themselves like those of forty years ago, divided into opposing blocs and under the growing threat of a new nuclear war.

Source: oggi.it