STORY: He changed the world. The last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Now he is dead. In initial reactions, German and international politicians acknowledged Gorbachev’s importance for the Federal Republic and in particular for reunification. According to several Russian media, the Nobel Peace Prize winner died at the age of 91 in a hospital in Moscow. Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 at the age of 54. He set about reforming the system through political and economic freedoms. With his policy of glasnost and perestroika, in English openness and transformation, he is considered the most important pioneer for the end of the Cold War and for German unity. The political process that he initiated led to massive upheavals in all republics of the Soviet state. Many Russians did not forgive him for the dislocations unleashed by his reforms. When pro-democracy demonstrations swept the Eastern bloc in 1989, Gorbachev refrained from using violence. On December 25, 1991, he announced his resignation on television. 15 individual states emerged from the Soviet Union.