Mikhail Gorbachev: The rise and fall of the last Soviet leader

Mikhail Gorbachev, who died in Moscow at age 91, was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union [File: Reuters]

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms put an end to the nuclear arms race and the Cold War, has died. He was 91.

Deeply revered in the West — where he was nicknamed “Gorby” — Gorbachev was in many ways a nemesis to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who built the Iron Curtain, turned most of Eastern Europe into a bloc of Moscow’s satellites and challenged Washington’s political supremacy in a Manichean confrontation that put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.