Mikhail Gorbachev, First and Only President of the Soviet Union, Dies at 91 Programming note: While Phil is off this week, the D.C. Brief is highlighting work from TIME's Washington bureau. Today we're featuring Phil's obituary of Gorbachev, which he wrote in advance of the Russian leader's passing on Tuesday. Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only President of the Soviet Union, has died, according to Russian media. He was 91. He will be remembered, at least in the West, as a pragmatic leader who transparently transitioned the Soviet Union away from its days as an Evil Empire and toward a more modernized economy that was integrated on a global scale. At home, however, he is largely seen as the man who brought a collapse of Soviet-era prestige and power, preaching reform while protecting his own influence. In a 2017 poll of Russians, 30% said they had anger or distaste toward him, and 13% said they felt disgust or hate for him. For many, he was the harbinger of the end of Russian greatness. Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which has led to punishing economic sanctions and the highest tensions with the U.S. and Europe since the Cold War, has been seen as an attempt to reclaim at least some of the power and glory lost as a result of Gorbachev's legacy. Gorbachev himself refrained from commenting publicly on the war, but argued in 2016 that tensions were the fault of Kyiv's lean toward NATO. “This conflict was not of Russia’s making. It has its roots within Ukraine itself,” Gorbachev argued. When he left office in late 1991, there was no guide for what he should do next. The three most recent leaders of the Soviet system had died in office, and the most recent to have left the office with his health, Nikita Khrushchev, had died 20 years earlier. They offered few lessons on what, exactly, a former absolute leader of the Soviet system could do in retirement. The leader of the new Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, had made clear his disdain for Gorbachev, standing him up for a meeting, commandeering his offices to down whiskey before 9 a.m. and rushing Gorbachev from his Kremlin apartment in a manner that, according Gorbachev’s 1995 memoirs, “were most uncivilized, in the worst inherited Soviet traditions.” Yeltsin wouldn’t even meet him to hand-off the nuclear codes. (“I should have sent him off somewhere,” Gorbachev would tell an interviewer during a 2019 documentary.) So at age 60, the ruler of a collapsing Super Power found himself out in the Russian cold. The Russian public dismissed him as a fool who embodied a failed experiment with communism and a worse-imagined pursuit of reform. The country quickly went to work burying its past, voting to rename Leningrad as Saint Petersburg in one of the most high-profile attempts at historical revision. To foster a sense of national identity, the country would also start to revive the pageantry from its czarist era, including its national anthem. In the years that followed, Gorbachev would emerge in the West as a global figure who presided over what was, at the time, seen as a peaceful end to the Cold War. He started what is commonly called the Gorbachev Foundation to publish documents related to the period of perestroika that he presided over and his approaches to policy. He became something of a celebrity as well, charging hefty fees for speeches. He wrote a monthly column on global affairs for The New York Times and also appeared in Pizza Hut commercials, a nod to just how closely the world watched the collapse of an empire that spanned 11 time zones. “Change is rarely painless,” Gorbachev wrote in his 2016 memoirs. “It affects people’s lives and interests, and that is why we need to do everything possible to mitigate painful consequences. There should be no attempt to go for a ‘big bang’ at the outset.” Read the full obituary. | 
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