The Latest Breaking News from Boris Yeltsin

The Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, passed away on Tuesday at 91 in Moscow after a prolonged illness.

Few world leaders have cut a more consequential but ultimately tragic figure than Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose death at the age of 91 has been announced by Russian state media.

A look back at the Soviet leader who changed history

Euphoria. There is no better word to describe my feelings, the feelings of many in the Soviet intelligentsia, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and started the reforms that the world came to know as perestroika and glasnost. It was the euphoria of liberation, freedom, hope.

For all the adulation he inspired in the West, Mikhail Gorbachev was a tragic figure who failed in the historic mission he had defined for his own country.

His death was announced by multiple Russian news agencies on Tuesday evening, citing officials at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow.

Here is a timeline of some key events over the nearly seven years that Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at age 91, held power in the Soviet Union.

Lauded in the West as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War without bloodshed, Mikhail Gorbachev was widely despised at home as the gravedigger of the communist Soviet Union.

The world leader who closed out the Cold War and brought democracy to the former Soviet Union died Tuesday at the age of 91, according t