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Mikhail Gorbachev: For Putin, the former Soviet leader had a huge impact on world history

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had a “tremendous impact on the course of world history,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a condolence cable sent today. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died yesterday, Tuesday, aged 91.

“Mikhail Gorbachev is a politician and a political personality who had a great impact on the course of world history. He led our country through a period of complex and dramatic changes, and great challenges in foreign policy, economic and social,” he said in a condolence telegram released by the Kremlin, as broadcast by international agencies and relayed by the Athens News Agency.

THE Putin said Gorbachev “deeply realized that reforms were necessary” and struggled to offer his own solutions to the problems facing the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

“He preferred peace to personal power”

The same time, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov paid tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev today, saying the last Soviet leader preferred peace to “personal power”.

“Let us keep this in our memory forever: he loved his wife more than his work, he put human rights above the state, he valued a peaceful sky more than personal power,” Muratov noted in an article he published on the website of the independent newspaper Novaïa Gazeta, which Gorbachev had helped launch.

“He hated war. He hated “realpolitik”. He was convinced that the time when the world’s problems were solved by force had passed (…) He freed political prisoners,” continues Muratov in his eulogy for the deceased.

Gorbachev “gave our country and the world an incredible gift: he gave us 30 years of peace. Without the threat of global nuclear war. Who is capable of doing the same?”, he emphasizes.

In addition to his tribute to Gorbachev, Muratov’s remarks also echoed an indictment of Russia’s current president amid a military offensive in Ukraine and a major strengthening of repression in Russia, according to AFP.

However, the name of Russian President Vladimir Putin is not mentioned anywhere in Muratov’s text, the agency added.

Gorbachev had strong ties to that independent newspaper in Russia, Novaya Gazeta, of which Muratov is editor. Last year’s Nobel Peace laureate was forced to suspend her extradition to Russia in March due to the crackdown.

Gorbachev had mainly supported the newspaper, which was first published in 1993, with the Nobel Peace Prize money awarded to him in 1990.

Source: News Beast

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