“Mikhail Gorbachev will go down in history as the man who tried to turn a dictatorship into a democracy”, reacts this Tuesday on franceinfo the former special adviser to François Mitterrand, Jacques Attali, after the death of the last leader of the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev died Tuesday in Russia of a “serious and long illness” at the age of 91, said the Central Clinical Hospital where he was being treated. The former head of state led the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991.
Jacques Attali met him in the company of François Mitterrand, when the latter was Minister of Agriculture and remembers “of a man truly free from the old system. He had truly chosen a path which he had matured, which was to maintain the system of collective ownership and the Soviet Union but to install a democratic system, to gradually eradicate the fear and stop shooting at the crowd.”
Considered the architect of the end of the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. “Few people have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize as much as he, emphasizes Jacques Attali. He really did everything for it. The fall of the Berlin Wall is nothing. It was he who made it. From the moment when in August 1989 he ordered Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Németh to open the border between Hungary and Austria, all East Germans could cross into West Germany and the fall of the Wall was already a reality.”