“Elements of a national funeral” but an absent Russian president, a public ceremony in the midst of public indifference and even hostility. The funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, will be held this Saturday in Moscow but will have to accommodate many contrasts.
The funeral of the Soviet Union’s last leader Mikhail Gorbachev is taking place in Moscow on Saturday, a minimal ceremony that President Vladimir Putin will not attend, a sign of his controversial heritage in Russia. A great political figure of the 20th century, Gorbachev died Tuesday evening at the age of 91 following a “long and serious illness”, according to the hospital where he was treated.
He made history by precipitating, in spite of himself, the disappearance of the Soviet empire in 1991, while he was trying to save it with democratic and economic reforms, thus ending the Cold War.
Buried alongside his wife
Hailed in the West as a man of peace, Gorbachev is seen by many in Russia as responsible for Moscow’s geopolitical downgrade and the years of political, economic and moral crisis that followed the fall of the USSR. A sign of this disaffection, no day of national mourning has been announced, even if “national funeral elements” will be present at the burial of Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular an “honor guard”, underlined the Kremlin. And, in a context of high tensions between Russia and Western countries over the conflict in Ukraine, no foreign leader has announced a trip to attend the funeral in Moscow.
The funeral will begin with a farewell ceremony at the House of Trade Unions, a symbolic place in the Russian capital where the remains of several communist dignitaries were exposed, such as that of Joseph Stalin, in 1953. The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. , local time, will be open to the public, the Gorbachev Foundation announced. The former Soviet leader will then be buried in the Novodevichy cemetery, next to his wife Raisa Gorbatcheva, who died in 1999 and to whom he was very close.