Russian news agencies reported that Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday at the age of 92.

Though in power less than seven years, Gorbachev unleashed a breathtaking series of changes. But they quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation.

Gorbachev struggled in vain to prevent that collapse.

His internal reforms helped weaken the Soviet Union to the point where it fell apart, a moment that President Vladimir Putin has called the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.

Putin expressed "his deepest condolences", Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Interfax. "Tomorrow he will send a telegram of condolences to his family and friends," he said.

His policy of "glasnost" – free speech – allowed previously unthinkable criticism of the party and the state, but also emboldened nationalists who began to press for independence in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere.

Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turbulence that his reforms unleashed, considering the subsequent plunge in their living standards too high a price to pay for democracy.

World leaders were quick to pay tribute. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said Gorbachev, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, had opened the way for a free Europe.

U.S. President Joe Biden called Gorbachev a "man of remarkable vision" and a "rare leader" who had "the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it."

"The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people," Biden said in a statement.

"Hard to think of a single person who altered the course of history more in a positive direction" than Gorbachev, said Michael McFaul, a political analyst and former U.S. ambassador in Moscow, on Twitter.

"Gorbachev was an idealist who believed in the power of ideas and individuals. We should learn from his legacy."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, citing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, said Gorbachev's "tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all."

Gorbachev's decline was humiliating. His power hopelessly sapped by an attempted coup against him in August 1991, he spent his last months in office watching republic after republic declare independence until he resigned on Dec. 25, 1991. The Soviet Union wrote itself into oblivion a day later.

A quarter-century after the collapse, Gorbachev told The Associated Press (AP) that he had not considered using widespread force to try to keep the USSR together because he feared chaos in the nuclear country.

"The country was loaded to the brim with weapons. And it would have immediately pushed the country into a civil war," he said.

Western partnerships

After decades of Cold War tension and confrontation, Gorbachev brought the Soviet Union closer to the West than at any point since World War II.

"He gave freedom to hundreds of millions of people in Russia and around it, and also half of Europe," said former Russian liberal opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky. "Few leaders in history have had such a decisive influence on their time."

But Gorbachev saw his legacy wrecked late in life, as the invasion of Ukraine brought Western sanctions crashing down on Moscow, and politicians in both Russia and the West began to speak of a new Cold War.

"Gorbachev died in a symbolic way when his life's work, freedom, was effectively destroyed by Putin," said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He will be buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, said Tass, citing the foundation that the ex-Soviet leader set up once he left office.

"We are all orphans now. But not everyone realizes it," said Alexei Venediktov, head of a liberal media radio outlet that closed down after coming under pressure over its coverage of the Ukraine war.

When pro-democracy protests rocked Soviet bloc nations in communist Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev refrained from using force – unlike previous Kremlin leaders who had sent tanks to crush uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

But the protests fuelled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated over the next two years in chaotic fashion.

Gorbachev – who was briefly deposed in an August 1991 coup by party hardliners – struggled vainly to prevent that collapse.

Turbulent reforms

"The era of Gorbachev is the era of perestroika, the era of hope, the era of our entry into a missile-free world ... but there was one miscalculation: we did not know our country well," said Vladimir Shevchenko, who headed Gorbachev's protocol office when he was Soviet leader.

"Our union fell apart, that was a tragedy and his tragedy," RIA news agency cited him as saying.

On becoming general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, aged just 54, he had set out to revitalize the system by introducing limited political and economic freedoms, but his reforms spun out of control. read more

"He was a good man – he was a decent man. I think his tragedy is in a sense that he was too decent for the country he was leading," said Gorbachev biographer William Taubman, a professor emeritus at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Gorbachev's policy of "glasnost" allowed previously unthinkable criticism of the party and the state, but also emboldened nationalists who began to press for independence in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere.

Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the turbulence that his reforms unleashed, considering the subsequent plunge in their living standards too high a price to pay for democracy.