Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who helped end Cold War, dies at 91

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose vision of humane communism liberated millions, bridled the global arms race and knocked down the walls dividing East and West, has died, according to Russian news agencies.

Gorbachev, who had been in declining health, suffering from acute diabetes, was 91 and had been undergoing treatment at a hospital, according the news agencies.

One of the most influential politicians of the 20th century, Gorbachev used his six years as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to systematically dismantle the machinery of repression.

He freed political prisoners, lifted the Iron Curtain, liberated the arts and pulled Red Army troops out of foreign conflicts such as the country’s 10-year debacle in Afghanistan. He forged disarmament treaties with Cold War enemies that helped melt away that adversarial era and revolutionized Soviet relations with the industrial powerhouses of the West.

His controversial reforms, some short-lived, made perestroika and glasnost household words around the globe in the 1980s and removed the shackles from a society deeply scarred by dictatorships that for decades had restricted thought, word and deed.

With his quixotic efforts to rescue a political order beyond salvation, he ushered in the unfamiliar notion of free elections, which opened the way for states in Eastern Europe and republics of the Soviet Union to break free of Moscow’s rule.

“The winds of the Cold War are