MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has died aged 91 in Moscow, according to Russian news reports.

Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital said he had died “after a long and serious illness.” 

Gorbachev led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985-91 and is famous for his policies of “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness), which were pitched as attempts to democratise Soviet socialism and make it more economically efficient. Critics said the policies dismantled much of the socialist system and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

Following a failed bid to overthrow him by Soviet loyalists in August 1991, he was outmanoeuvred by the then head of the Russian republic within the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin, paving the way for Russia’s declaration of independence from the USSR which prompted its collapse despite 77 per cent of Soviet citizens having voted to preserve the union on an 80 per cent turnout that March.

Hailed in the West for ending the cold war, Gorbachev was deeply unpopular in post-Soviet Russia because of the fall in living standards that followed the dissolution of the union. In 1992 he was formally expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for causing its collapse.