Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, prior to meeting with Yitzhak Rabin at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Israel, on June 17, 1992. Rabin was concluding a political campaign which enabled his Labor Party to win the 13th Knesset parliamentary elections the following week. Gorbachev was the final of 8 leaders of the Soviet Union. He presided of the dissolution of the Soviet Union after his nearly 6 and a half year as leader, in august, 1991. Gorbachev was a pragmatist and reformer but displeased Soviet imperialists as well as reformers who felt his reforms did not come fast nor reach far enough. His policies of glasnost and perestroika were viewed skeptically and warily by American President Ronald Reagan but both agreed to pursue mutually conciliatory policies, and he pursued confidence building measures with the West, not the least of which was a nuclear detente. Domestically he lessened but could not eliminate endemic corruption, and made some economic progress. Gorbachev died in Moscow after a long illness on August 30, 2022, at the age of 91.
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