No state honors or Putin’s presence at the funeral are planned Gorbachev’s reforms led to the end of the Soviet Union The former leader was stunned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Sept 3 (Reuters) – Mikhail Gorbachev, the beloved Soviet leader of the West who lived to see all the reforms he had championed in his homeland undone, will be buried on Saturday without state honors or the presence of his current overlord Kremlin. Gorbachev became a hero in the West for enabling Eastern Europe to shake off more than four decades of Soviet communist control, allowing East and West Germany to reunite and forging arms control agreements with the United States. But when the 15 Soviet republics seized the same freedoms to demand independence, Gorbachev was powerless to prevent the collapse of the union in 1991, six years after he had become its leader. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up For this, and the economic chaos unleashed by the “perestroika” liberalization program, many Russians could not forgive him. Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91, was given a public mission – Muscovites will be able to see his coffin in the imposing Hall of Columns, in front of the Kremlin, where previous Soviet leaders had mourned. But it was no surprise that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a long-time KGB intelligence officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union a “geopolitical catastrophe”, denied Gorbachev all state honors and said he was too busy to attend the funeral .
GORBATCHIF WAS ‘CRASHED’ BY EVENTS IN UKRAINE
The many Western heads of state and government who would surely have attended will also be absent, kept out of the gap in East-West relations opened by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Instead, an unknown number of ordinary Russians will pass from 10 a.m. (0700 GMT) next to the open casket of the Nobel Peace laureate, whose guard of honor will provide an “element” of a state occasion, according to the Kremlin. All this will be a far cry from the national day of mourning and state funeral at Moscow’s main cathedral given in 2007 to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who helped oust Gorbachev as the Soviet Union collapsed and later chose Putin as his. own successor. After the ceremony, however, Gorbachev will be buried like Yeltsin in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, next to his adoring wife Raisa, who bereaved him for 23 painful years. Upon entering the Kremlin in 2000, Putin wasted little time in overturning the political pluralism that had developed from Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost,” or openness, and slowly began to rebuild Moscow’s influence in many of the its lost democracies. The invasion of Ukraine in February was arguably the final nail in the coffin of Gorbachev’s legacy, which his longtime interpreter and aide said left him “shocked and bewildered” in the final months of his life. read more “It’s not only the operation that started on February 24, but the whole development of relations between Russia and Ukraine in recent years was really a big blow for him. It really crushed him, emotionally and psychologically,” said Pavel Palazhchenko. he told Reuters in an interview. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up Report from Reuters. Written by Kevin Liffey. Edited by Andrew Cawthorne Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
