Jamaica PM pays tribute to late Soviet Union Leader Mikhail Gorbachev

Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness has joined the international community in paying tribute to the former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91.

“Internationally recognized for his role in ending the Cold War and building bridges with leaders outside of the Soviet Union,” Holness, who is on a visit to Trinidad and Tobago participating in that country’s 60^th anniversary of political independence from Britain, wrote on his Twitter page.

“I extend condolences to his family and loved ones,” Holness added in paying respect to the Nobel Peace prize winner.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a Russian and Soviet politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union. As the country's head of state from 1988 to 1991, he served as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, and President of the Soviet Union from 1990 until the country's dissolution in 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s.

Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union had set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation,

Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and its socialist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform to be necessary, particularly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. He withdrew from the Soviet–Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States president Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and end the Cold War

Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital, said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness”.

While he was revered in the West, to many inside Russia, Gorbachev was a disaster with President Vladimir Putin once describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

CMC/fd/ir/2022