SEOUL — Roh Tae-woo, South Korea’s final military-backed president who solid ties with Communist foes and tolerated the nation’s rambunctious transition from dictatorship to democracy, however who ended up in jail for mutiny and corruption, died right here on Tuesday. He was 88.

Seoul Nationwide College Hospital mentioned Mr. Roh died in an intensive care unit there, however offered no additional particulars.

Mr. Roh, who was president from 1988 to 1993, led South Korea by means of a tumultuous interval as a transitional (and largely unpopular) determine between army and civilian rule.

“He was a bridge between authoritarianism and democracy,” mentioned Lee Chung-hee, a professor emeritus at Hankuk College of Overseas Research. “South Korea went by means of the transition with out struggling a bloody revolution.”

Roh Tae-woo was born in Daegu, in southeast Korea, on Dec. 4, 1932, the son of a rural authorities official who died when Mr. Roh was 7. On the Korean Army Academy he met one other poor household’s son, Chun Doo-hwan, and the 2 solid a friendship that may form their nation’s future.

Talking the identical dialect and bonded by their regional prejudices, the 2 and their allies from Gyeongsang, a southeast province, climbed the military hierarchy, sponsored by the army strongman Park Chung-hee. They pulled one another up by means of a secret membership they fashioned, referred to as Hanahoe, which roughly means “an affiliation for one-for-all, all-for-one.”

When Mr. Park was assassinated by his spy chief in 1979, Mr. Roh, a division commander charged with guarding the border with North Korea, diverted his troops to help Mr. Chun, on the time a significant common and head of the Military Intelligence Command, as Mr. Chun seized energy in a coup on Dec. 12, 1979.

Additionally they deployed tanks and paratroopers into the southwestern metropolis of Gwangju, the place residents rose up in an armed insurrection in Might 1980. The ensuing blood bathtub, which got here to represent the brutality of the South’s army on the time, took not less than 191 lives, together with 26 troopers and cops.

Mr. Roh remained a low-key and trustworthy No. 2 throughout Mr. Chun’s iron-fisted rule, which lasted till early 1988. He oversaw South Korea’s profitable bid for the 1988 Olympics, beating enormous odds towards the bid of Japan. In a memoir, he wrote that a part of his successful technique was to impress Worldwide Olympic Committee members by assigning Korean magnificence queens as their private escorts at I.O.C. conferences.

In 1987, Mr. Chun handpicked Mr. Roh because the presidential candidate of his ruling celebration. That successfully made him the following president — the nation selected its president by an electoral faculty stuffed with pro-government delegates — till residents rose up in Seoul and different cities to stage enormous protests demanding an finish to army rule.

To move off rioting, Mr. Chun and Mr. Roh acceded to calls for for political reforms, together with holding a well-liked election. Mr. Roh received that contest simply when the opposition vote was break up between two dissident candidates, Kim Younger-sam and Kim Dae-jung, who despised one another as a lot as they disliked army rule. Mr. Roh’s victory made him the nation’s first instantly elected president in 16 years.

Mr. Roh presided over the opening ceremony of the Olympics, a coming-out celebration for a nation happy with having constructed a roaring economic system from the ashes of the Korean Battle. The 1988 Video games have been an important success regardless of a North Korean try to sabotage them with the bombing of a South Korean passenger jet in 1987, and regardless of demonstrations by college students chanting “Down with dictatorship!” and hurling kerosene bombs.

Emboldened, Mr. Roh pushed his coverage of “Nordpolitik,” opening diplomatic relations with nations just like the Soviet Union and China — an effort that helped thaw relations on the divided Korean Peninsula.

The 2 Koreas joined the United Nations concurrently in 1991. Additionally they signed an settlement to maintain the peninsula freed from nuclear weapons — an accord North Korea has flouted with six nuclear assessments since 2006.

Mr. Roh was a marked distinction with the hard-line ex-generals who had led the nation earlier than him, Mr. Park and Mr. Chun. Portraits of a smiling Mr. Roh went up on the partitions of presidency workplaces. He allowed comedians to make enjoyable of politicians, together with Mr. Chun, his now disgraced buddy, who was compelled into exile in a Buddhist monastery as calls mounted to punish him and his kin for corruption.

However he additionally turned a patron for the “TK Mafia,” former generals and technocrats from Daegu, his hometown, and the encircling Gyeongsang area — highly effective figures who crammed essential authorities and celebration posts. Throughout his rule, the police raided factories to interrupt up staff’ strikes and arrested authorities critics, together with dissidents who had returned from Pyongyang, North Korean’s capital, the place that they had promoted Korean unification.

“His rule had traits of each army authoritarianism and civilian presidency,” mentioned Choi Jin, head of the nonpartisan Institute of Presidential Management.

Mr. Roh’s on-and-off tolerance for political protests, his vacillation between rival factions inside his celebration, his meek smile — all these mixed to offer him the nickname he was finest remembered for: Mul Tae-woo, the Korean equal of “Roh the spineless.”

His repeated attraction to his uncertain folks — “Please, imagine me; I’m an unusual man such as you” — turned him into the butt of ridicule after he stepped down in 1993, when he and Mr. Chun have been every discovered to have diverted a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in bribes into their very own coffers.

They have been additionally convicted in 1996 of treason and mutiny expenses for his or her roles within the coup and the Gwangju bloodbath. Mr. Chun was sentenced to loss of life — the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment — whereas Mr. Roh was sentenced to 17 years in jail. Each have been pardoned and launched from in December 1997.

The 2 pals didn’t speak to one another of their ignominious retirements, though they lived in the identical neighborhood in Seoul. Mr. Chun typically ventured exterior surrounded by his previous colleagues, however Mr. Roh lived quietly, largely forgotten by the folks he had led.

“Roh Tae-woo was a characterless president who has disappeared from common reminiscences,” mentioned Mr. Choi, of the management institute. “South Koreans rebelled towards dictators, however they like a frontrunner with a robust character.”