Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought down the Iron Curtain, died at the age 91 following a long illness Tuesday, according to Russian state and independent media.

Gorbachev’s office said earlier that he was undergoing treatment at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital. No other information about his death was immediately provided.

Gorbachev was the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the communist state formed in 1922 that controlled much of Eurasia. His seven-year tenure as Soviet president ended in humiliation and chaos but resulted in remarkable reforms that ended the Cold War in the early 90s.

After taking power in 1985, Gorbachev’s introduction of limited economic and political freedoms – including his  “glasnost” policy of free speech – ultimately led to the USSR’s demise. 

He refrained from using force to crush pro-democracy protests in the Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe two years prior to the Soviet Union’s fall. The protests ended with 15 republics demanding autonomy from the USSR.

His final hold of power was effectively taken away in an August 1991 coup, after which he watched from the sidelines as Soviet republics announced their independence. 

By the time Gorbachev resigned as USSR leader on Christmas Day of 1991, the world’s largest country was already unraveling due to deepening economic woes and secessionist bids.

The resignation left the authoritarian former Soviet state in disarray, but ended decades of East-West nuclear confrontations. Gorbachev had brokered arms reduction deals with the US and Western partnerships that brought about the reunification of Germany.

Decades after the collapse, the USSR’s eighth and last leader said he did not use force to keep the communist bloc together over fears of a nuclear winter. 

“The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And it would have immediately pushed the country into a civil war,” Gorbachev said in 2016.

The fall of the USSR also marked the freedom of Eastern European nations that had long been under its authoritarian control, but sowed the erratic divisions and alliances that are currently being exploited in Russia’s current unprovoked war with Ukraine, the first bloody conflict on the European continent since World War II. 

Moscow’s current ramped up authoritarianism and crackdown on free speech combined with escalating Western sanctions on Russia and a skyrocketing NATO presence has led international leaders to speak openly of a “new Cold War,” and led Gorbachev himself to believe that his life’s work had been undone by President Vladimir Putin.

 “All Gorbachev’s reforms—to zero, to ashes, to smoke,” Alexei Venidiktov, told Forbes Russia in July after speaking with the ailing former president.

“Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life’s work, freedom, was effectively destroyed by Putin,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referencing the war in Ukraine.

Gorbachev, the son of poor peasant farmers, grew up under the rule of Joseph Stalin in Russia’s rural Stavropol Krai territory, just north of Georgia. He received a law degree in Moscow and worked his way up through the ranks of the Communist Party, first as a proponent of de-Stalinization reforms.

His call for reform was accelerated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and in the next few years he withdrew from the Soviet-Afghan War – a Cold War proxy conflict – and met with President Ronald Regan to set up a blueprint for nuclear disarmament.

He will be remembered as one of the most consequential leaders of the last half of the 20th century. 

“I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” Gorbachev said in 1992.

“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.

With the benefit of decades of hindsight, he said in 2018 he would reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union – which he once called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” – if he could.

Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his efforts to end the Cold War but was never forgiven by some Russians for the volatility that came with the sudden fall of the Soviet Union.

 “He gave us all freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it,” liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet Zvezda after visiting the ailing former leader in the hospital earlier this summer.

“The era of Gorbachev is the era of perestroika, the era of hope, the era of our entry into a missile-free world … but there was one miscalculation: we did not know our country well,” said Vladimir Shevchenko, who headed Gorbachev’s protocol office when he was Soviet leader.

“Our union fell apart, that was a tragedy and his tragedy,” RIA news agency cited him as saying.

A Kremlin spokesperson said President Putin offered “his deepest condolences” to Gorbachev’s family.

“Tomorrow he will send a telegram of condolences to his family and friends,” Dmitry Peskov told Interfax news agency.

Gorbachev was set to be buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, according to Russian state media.

With Post wires