Image source, Getty Images

Thank you for following our live coverage of reaction to the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful end. Let's recap what we've heard:

• Paying tribute, the head of the UN said Gorbachev "changed the course of history"
• US President Joe Biden said he had the "imagination to see that a different future was possible" amid Cold War tensions
• French President Emmanuel Macron said Gorbachev's "commitment to peace in Europe changed our common history"
• And German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Gorbachev as a "courageous reformer"
• UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: "In a time of Putin's aggression in Ukraine, his tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all."
• But his legacy is divisive – many Russians never forgave him for the turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union
• Vladimir Putin expressed his deepest condolences after Gorbachev's death was announced
• But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Gorbachev had a misplaced "romanticism" about the West
• He will be buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife, who died in 1999, Tass news agency said

Read our full story here and watch BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg's obituary below:

We've been getting more reaction from people who knew the former Soviet leader.

Nina Khrusheva is the granddaughter of former Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev. She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Gorbachev's death marked the end of an era.

Regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Khrusheva says "it seems we moved back the clock" to something Gorbachev "tried to save us from". She says she had heard he was "completely devastated" by the war.

When President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden met in Geneva in June 2021, Gorbachev had hoped it would be a turning point in international relations, like he was able to do with US President Ronald Regan and the UK's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Khrusheva says Gorbachev was "devastated by the development of global affairs".

Khrusheva, who is professor of international affairs at The New School in New York, says she once spoke to him about his unpopularity in Russia. Gorbachev said: "I gave Poland to the Poles, what is it I'm accused of?"

She says he remembered in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was falling, he was called by Socialist leaders who told him to "save the Soviet Socialist Bloc". He retorted: "I can't dictate the fates of the world to the world... if they don't want to be with us we really have to let them go."

Until that time, says Khrusheva, Soviet tanks would have been sent into areas wanting to break away from the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, in 1989, was the first Russian leader in history to refuse to do so.

Image source, PA Media

Former British Prime Minister John Major has paid tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev.

In a statement, Major says the former Soviet leader "was the most remarkable figure in post-war Russia, and was instrumental in bringing the Cold War to a close".

"At the moment it was needed, he acted and spoke for peace, and stood on the right side of history," he adds.

John Major was the UK's prime minister from 1990 to 1997.

Our colleagues at BBC Monitoring have been looking at how the Russian media are covering Mikhail Gorbachev's death. Here's a quick round up from them:

In a 10-minute tribute, news channel Rossiya 24 noted Gorbachev's popularity abroad, but said that inside the country his policies provoked "increasingly more questions".

It also sought to present Gorbachev as having been in favour of Russia's actions in Ukraine: in a clip from a 2014 interview, he is shown saying that apart from the western part of the country, Ukraine was populated by "people who are very close to us".

"He has always been considered an extremely controversial figure in modern Russian history," said Channel One.

"Will there be a monument to Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia?" wondered NTV, adding that attitudes to him inside the country were "ambivalent".

The pro-Kremlin daily newspaper Izvestia described Gorbachev as "the leader of a great country, which he did not manage to hold together".

We've got a fresh response to the death of Mikhail Gorbachev from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Gorbachev was a statesman who will go down in history, Peskov says, according to the Reuters news agency.

But the man who opened up the Soviet Union and had famously good relationships with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had a misplaced “romanticism” about the possibility of cordial relations with the West, he adds.

Peskov continues: "The bloodthirstiness of our opponents showed itself."

Image source, CARSTEN REHDER/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock

Russian president Vladimir Putin has expressed his "deep sympathies" after Mikhail Gorbachev's death. But the two men haven't always seen eye to eye, with the former Soviet leader becoming a strong critic of the leader in the Kremlin in recent years. For Putin, the end of the Soviet Union - which Gorbachev's presided over - was a tragic mistake.

Speaking to the BBC in 2013, Gorbachev said he supported Putin during his first term as president - more than two decades ago - but then "relations between us soured". He decried new laws passed by Putin as an "attack on the rights of citizens", saying the Russian leader should change his style and "not be afraid of his own people".

He also said Putin's inner circle was full of "thieves and corrupt officials".

However, in 2014, Gorbachev defended Putin's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula. His statements led Ukraine to ban him from entering the country for five years.

In 2016, Gorbachev told the UK's Sunday Times that he would have acted the same way as Putin in a similar situation. He also said he thought the loss of trust between Russia and the West was "catastrophic". At the end of last year - before Russia's invasion of Ukraine - Gorbachev criticised American "arrogance" after the the Cold War as a reason for tensions in eastern Europe.

Despite their frictions, on Gorbachev's 90th birthday in March 2021, President Putin praised him as "one of the most outstanding statesmen of modern times who made a considerable impact on the history of our nation and the world".

The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has praised Mikhail Gorbachev as a "courageous reformer".

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been adding to his earlier tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, describing the former Soviet leader as someone who changed the world for the better.

"When you look at what he did to make Europe whole, free to give freedom to the countries of the former Soviet Union, it was a quite extraordinary thing," he says.

"Of course, Mikhail Gorbachev was one of those people who triggered a series of changes that perhaps he didn’t anticipate. Maybe he paid his own political price for it.

"What I worry about today is that the current leadership in Moscow is intent on undoing the good Gorbachev did and is intent on a revenge-driven attempt to recreate that Soviet Empire.

"And you are seeing that in Ukraine. That is the tragedy [and] something I think Gorbachev would have thought was unthinkable, unwarranted and irrational."

Image source, Getty Images

Former senior BBC correspondent Bridget Kendall first took up her post as Moscow correspondent in the summer of 1989 and witnessed Mikhail Gorbachev's political style first-hand during a trip to East Berlin that year.

The visit marked 40 years of the East German Socialist Republic under the communist socialist leader Erich Honecker and came at a "very tense time", she says.

"It was already a time when people in East Germany, particularly young people, were on the streets protesting in large numbers to say they wanted more freedom, freedom to be able to travel to the West," she tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"I remember it was very bizarre. On the one hand, the East German capital was full of goose-stepping East German soldiers celebrating the anniversary with Honecker - and Gorbachev was next to him standing on a podium saying 'We'll be here another 40 years'.

Image source, Getty Images

"And then Gorbachev ducked away after the official programme and went into a park where he was surrounded by East Germans. And he began to talk to them in Russian, saying, 'It's up to you what your future is'."

Kendall recalls this "vividly" as most journalists there were German and didn't speak Russian, leaving her to translate.

"Of course, he did this entirely deliberately because he knew very well that West German television companies would broadcast his words back into East Germany and it would go throughout the country as a kind of counterpoint to what was happening on the stage with Honecker," she adds.

"So that's a good example of his political style, the way he realised that he could play one side off against the other to try and further what he was trying to do."

Steve Rosenberg
BBC Russia editor

Image source, Getty Images

Mikhail Gorbachev had set out to modernise the Soviet Union. By the time he left office, the country didn't exist.

He'll be remembered by many in Russia as the leader who lost an empire.

And yet it was Gorbachev who gave so many in his country their first taste of freedom.

He was instrumental in ending the Cold War, and he worked with the US President Ronald Reagan to slash nuclear arsenals.

His reforms at home inspired millions across Central and Eastern Europe. They began pushing for their own freedoms from Moscow.

Communist regimes tumbled as the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Iron Curtain, came crashing down.

But much of what Gorbachev changed didn't last. In today's Russia, democratic freedoms are being eroded and east-west confrontation is back.

In April 1989, then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street. Thatcher hailed the talks as "deep, very wide-ranging and very friendly".

Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year later "for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations".

Watch Thatcher and Gorbachev hail their 1989 meeting as an celebration of the "opening up" of East and West.

A former British ambassador has shared a touching message penned by Mikhail Gorbachev to the diplomat's son, Charlie.

Tom Fletcher, a former UK ambassador to Lebanon and adviser to three prime ministers, wrote on Twitter that he had frequently asked world leaders to write down pieces of advice to his son.

He asked them what they'd like to say to him on his 14th birthday in 2020.

The note from Gorbachev, dated 6 June 2008, and which was written in Russian before being translated by an aide, noted that the former Soviet leader "may no longer be around" by the time Charlie read the message.

"The success you take will ultimately be equal to what you put in," the then-77-year old scrawled in looping handwriting.

"My best wishes for a life that makes a difference," concluded Gorbachev.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who served as the UK's ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92, told the BBC that despite how he is portrayed in Russian media, Gorbachev was a brave man who tried and failed to save his country.

"He's now, by the hard men in Russia, regarded as incompetent, weak and perhaps even a traitor who sold out to the West," says Braithwaite.

"He was a decent man who really did try to do something original for his country."

The former top diplomat adds: "He's in the long line of Russian reformers who tried to do something about the burdensome legacy that Russia suffers from - and who failed."

Image source, Getty Images

Arnold Schwarzenegger has paid tribute to the statesman on Twitter,, external sharing how he admired Gorbachev's reformist courage as leader of the USSR.

"Imagine rising to the very top of any organization, and then having the wisdom AND the courage to look around and say, 'This doesn’t work for the people, someone has to fix it. If not me, who? If not now, when?'" wrote the action star.

"He did exactly that in the old Soviet Union. He will be remembered for all time as a hero who dismantled the communist system despite what it meant for his own power.

"He belongs to history now," continued Schwarzenegger.

"When you see a chance to make an impact, to leave a better world for the next generation, I hope you’ll think about Mikhail Gorbachev and ask yourself, 'If not me, who? If not now, when?' I know I will."

Image source, Getty Images

US President Joe Biden has released a statement hailing "a man of remarkable vision" and sending his condolences.

"When he came to power, the Cold War had gone on for nearly 40 years and communism for even longer, with devastating consequences," says Biden.

Gorbachev was brave enough to embrace democratic reforms and nuclear disarmament, says Biden.

"These were the acts of a rare leader – one with 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 says that even after leaving the Kremlin, Gorbachev remained "deeply engaged".

People everywhere benefited from Gorbachev's "belief in a better world", says the US president.

Gorbachev became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century, but he was born into relative poverty on 2 March 1931 in the Stavropol region of southern Russia.

See more of Gorbachev's life in pictures:

In pictures: The life of ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Reuters

The BBC's Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg has interviewed Gorbachev five different times since his ill-fated run for president in 1996.

Together they have discussed everything from his lasting legacy and Putin's grip on Russia to popular Soviet-era songs and the importance of chicken in Russian life.

Read Steve's thoughts on Gorbachev here:

Mikhail Gorbachev: Remembering a warm-hearted and generous man

Image source, Reuters

Image source, Getty Images

Former US Secretary of State James A Baker has paid tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev and said that the world will miss his influence on international affairs.

Baker, who negotiated the reunification of Germany with Gorbachev in 1990, hailed the Soviet leader and said his efforts had ensured the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.

"History will remember Mikhail Gorbachev as a giant who steered his great nation toward democracy," Baker said.

"He played the critical role in a peaceful conclusion of the Cold War by his decision against using force to hold the empire together. I found him to be an honest broker and could count on his word despite domestic pressure in Moscow."

"The free world misses him greatly," Baker concluded.

Image source, Getty Images

A number of EU leaders have paid tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev after the announcement of the former Soviet leader's death.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Gorbachev's "commitment to peace in Europe changed our common history".

Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin tweeted his condolences and hailed Gorbachev's "commitment to openness, reform, and building bridges with the West".

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said the 91-year-old "shaped the rapprochement between East and West after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe".

And Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte lamented the loss of a "a courageous reformer with immense influence on history".

When the BBC's Steve Rosenberg interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev in 2013, he certainly didn't expect it to end in a singalong.

Here's what Steve wrote about the encounter:

The interview was over and Mr Gorbachev was showing us the grand piano in the corner of the room. 'Can any of you play?' he asked. I nodded. 'Then, please, play something,' he replied.

I sat down and played the Russian classic 'Moscow Nights' - and Mr Gorbachev began to sing. That was followed by 'Dark is the Night' and 'The Misty Morning' - a song he said was a favourite of his late wife.

'Raisa liked my singing,' he smiled. It was a slightly surreal, but rather special moment which I think shows the warm human side of the man who ended the Cold War.

Watch the clip here:

Duetting with Mikhail Gorbachev