Gorby gorbachev biography

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.

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Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, reversed the course laid down by Stalin and his succe