Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist.

Today from London, I'm your host Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The transition to electric vehicles is coming along at a good clip, but there's a speed bump ahead.

The rising demand for batteries may outstrip the capacity to manufacture them or even the capacity to mine the materials they require.

And a full 50 years ago an American artist named Michael Heiser started working on City, a vast sculpture carved into the landscape of the Nevada desert.

At last it's done. Our culture correspondent pays a visit ahead of the public opening this week.

But first...

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has died in a hospital in Moscow aged 91.

Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the evil empire.

He gave freedom to a country which had been stuck in totalitarian rule for more than 70 years.

Akhadiya Strovsky is our Russian editor. He was one of a very, very few Russian leaders.

In fact, the only Russian leader who managed to leave power alive lead a productive public life and remain admired by many of his own compatriots.

And tell me how it is that he came to power in the first place. What was his background in the party?

He was a relatively little known party man in charge of agriculture. He was much younger than the more senior rank, general sectors of the Communist Party who were dying very rapidly one after another.

It was called a hearse race as there was dying in quick succession.

And the party needed renewal. The KGB actually understood that the party needed renewal and the country needed modernization.

And he came to the front of the queue as somebody who was very loyal to the party but who was younger and they thought could keep the party together and the country together and would launch some modernizing economic reforms.

Nobody was thinking about the political reforms at the time. He would just make it more modern.

So he came quietly and very few expected him to launch the kind of reforms that he did in the late 80s.

So why was he able to carry those out? What was it about him that made him the right man for that job?

Gobi Jofi had a very interesting background. He was born in 1931. That's just two years after Stalin consolidated pretty much complete power in his hands.

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