MOSCOW, June 20. /TASS/. First President of the former Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev is under round-the-clock medical supervision at the Central Clinical Hospital and his health is not deteriorating, a source close to the politician told TASS on Monday.

The Mash Telegram channel said earlier without citing any sources that Gorbachev’s health "deteriorates periodically" and he is undergoing kidney dialysis at a Moscow hospital. "From time to time, he undergoes blood purification," it claimed.

"He was taken to the hospital [in 2020] at the very onset of the COVID [pandemic], since doctors from the Central Clinical Hospital had insisted on that. He is entitled to this as the former president. And the doctor we spoke to told us that it was better for him - he was 88 - to be under medical supervision. He is still there, under 24-hour medical supervision. His health has not deteriorated recently, but medics say that he (he is 91 now) is better off staying under medical surveillance. And he is staying there, not at home," the source said.

The Gorbachev Foundation refused to comment on any medical information.

Gorbachev, the architect of what was known as Perestroika, held the top office in the former Soviet Union for six years. Immediately after taking office as Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, he announced a new course. Later, he became chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, the bicameral legislature of the former Soviet Union. He put forward a constitutional provision that the administering role of the Communist Party be cancelled and the post of the country’s president be established.

Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, when the USSR ceased to exist. However, formally there is no corresponding entry in his Record of Employment kept at the Gorbachev Foundation that he stepped down from the nation’s highest post.