Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, is fired by thousands and Putin is absent

Hero for some and guilty of the Soviet collapse for others. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last leader of the former Soviet Union, received a funeral ceremony this Saturday, September 3, after his death last Tuesday at the age of 91.

Thousands of people gathered and lined up to see him off in Moscow’s historic Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions after the Kremlin allowed a public ceremony.

“I want to thank you for my childhood of freedom, which we don’t have today … I am a child of perestroika,” said Ilya, a financial services worker who declined to give his last name, using the Russian word for reform initiatives or Gorbachev reconstruction.

Pallbearers lifted Gorbachev’s wooden coffin, draped with a tricolor Russian flag, and carried it to the center of the room, where a soft recording of melancholy music from the movie “Schindler’s List” played in the background.

Holding bouquets of carnations and roses, mourners spoke of “paying homage” to Gorbachev’s legacy and the “gift of freedom” he gave the country.

Despite the anger many Russians have felt at him for hastening the end of the federal state of socialist republics, he remains supported by many liberal Russians.

“I am here to pay tribute to a great man… He took on a burden that none of us could bear and should be remembered for it, despite what everyone says,” Muscovite Galina Ivanchenko said.

Later, the coffin of the former political leader was transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery, in the country’s capital, where the remains of his wife Raísa Maksímovna, who died in 1999, are also found.

The last Soviet leader is fired in a ceremony with few state honors

The funeral ceremony took place in the same place where the last goodbye was given to other deceased Soviet leaders. However, these funerals do not have the character of a state funeral.

Although a spokesman for the Presidency pointed out that the ceremony was organized to have some sovereign elements, President Vladimir Putin was absent from the event, due to his “work schedule”.

However, last Thursday, September 1, the Russian president placed flowers privately on Gorbachev’s coffin, in a hospital in the capital, where he died.

Asked about the specific issues that keep Putin busy not to attend the funeral services, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that the president is holding a series of working meetings, an international phone call and that he needs to prepare for a forum of business in the Russian Far East which he plans to attend next week.

The many Western heads of state and government who would normally have attended also did not participate, distanced by the abyss in relations between Moscow and the West opened up after Putin’s decision to launch the invasion of Ukraine last February, a scenario that has once again led to Europe to war since the Balkan conflict in the 1990s.

However, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a conservative nationalist and one of the few European leaders who has good relations with the Russian president, confirmed his attendance, through his spokesman Zoltan Kovacs.

Several Russian officials and cultural figures, including lawmaker Konstantin Kosachyov and singer Alla Pugachyova, also paid their respects to the family of the deceased political leader.

But Gorbachev’s funeral contrasted sharply with the national day of mourning and state funeral, in Moscow’s main cathedral, given in 2007 to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who was instrumental in sidelining Gorbachev when the Union Soviet was crumbling. He was the man who later personally chose Putin as his successor.

Gorbachev, Putin’s antagonist

Not surprisingly, Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union a “geopolitical catastrophe,” denied Gorbachev all state honors and chose not to attend. to the funeral

When he first took office in 2000, Putin wasted no time in rolling back the political plurality that had developed from Gorbachev’s “glasnost” or openness policy, and slowly began to rebuild Moscow’s influence over many of their lost republics.

Pavel Palazhchenko, who was for years Gorbachev’s interpreter and assistant, told Reuters in an interview this week that Moscow’s actions against kyiv had left the former leader “shocked and bewildered” in the last months of his life.

“It’s not just the operation that started on February 24, but the whole evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine in the last few years that really was a big blow for him. It really crushed him, emotionally and psychologically,” Palazhchenko said.

Gorbachev became a hero to many in the West for enabling Eastern Europe to throw off more than four decades of Soviet communist control, allowing East and West Germany to reunify, and forging arms control treaties with the United States.

However, when the 15 Soviet republics seized the same freedoms to demand their independence, Gorbachev could not prevent the collapse of the Union in 1991, six years after becoming its leader.

For that, and the economic chaos unleashed by his “perestroika” liberalization program, many Russians could not forgive him.

The Kremlin’s refusal to declare a state funeral reflects its concern over the legacy of Gorbachev, who remains extolled around the world for bringing down the ‘Iron Curtain’ but has also been shunned by many at home because of the Soviet collapse. and the consequent financial scale that plunged millions of people into poverty.

With Reuters, AP and EFE