Russian President Vladimir Putin paid tribute to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday (30). However, the Russian president will not attend the funeral due to schedule restrictions, according to the Kremlin.
State television on Thursday showed Putin solemnly placing red roses beside Gorbachev’s coffin – left open as is traditional in Russia – at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where he died at the age of 91. Putin made a sign of the cross in Russian Orthodox style before briefly touching the edge of the coffin.
“Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him to do this on September 3, so he decided to do it today,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Gorbachev will not receive the state honors bestowed on Boris Yeltsin.
The Kremlin spokesman said Gorbachev’s ceremony would have “elements” of a state funeral and that the state was helping to organize it.
However, it will be a stark contrast to Yeltsin’s funeral, which was instrumental in putting Gorbachev aside when the Soviet Union fell apart and chose Putin, a KGB intelligence officer, as the man best suited to succeed him.
Gorbachev, idolized in the West for allowing Eastern Europe to escape Soviet communist control but unloved at home for the chaos his “perestroika” reforms unleashed, will be buried on Saturday after a public ceremony in Moscow’s Hall of Columns.
The great hall, within sight of the Kremlin, hosted the funerals of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev will receive a military honor guard – but his funeral will not be a state one.
When Yeltsin died in 2007, Putin declared a national day of mourning and, alongside world leaders, attended a grand state funeral at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine appears destined to reverse, at least in part, the collapse of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev failed to prevent in 1991.
Gorbachev’s decision to let the post-war Soviet communist bloc countries go their own way and the reunification of East and West Germany helped spark nationalist movements within the 15 Soviet republics that he was unable to suppress.
Five years after taking power in 2000, Putin called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
It took Putin more than 15 hours after Gorbachev’s death to publish a restrained message of condolence that said Gorbachev had had a “huge impact on the course of world history” and “deeply understood that reforms were necessary” to address the problems of the Soviet Union. in the 1980s.
about the funeral
Gorbachev will be buried alongside his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, Russian state media RIA Novosti said earlier this week, citing the Gorbachev foundation. The historic cemetery is the final resting place of many notable Russians, including writers Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, and former leaders Yeltsin and Nikita Khrushchev.
Gorbachev has become more critical of Putin and his increasingly restrictive regime in recent years, as he traveled the world promoting free speech and democracy as part of his founding. Meanwhile, Putin has blamed Gorbachev for the end of the USSR, which he considers the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
And while Gorbachev himself has not commented on Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, his foundation has called for peace talks, saying “there is nothing more precious in the world than human lives.”
Gorbachev is unlikely to receive many foreign guests at his funeral. In retaliation for Western sanctions imposed on Russia by countries over the war in Ukraine, Moscow banned hundreds of foreign officials from entering the country.
The long list of leaders currently barred from the country includes US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his predecessor Theresa May, as well as his likely successor Liz Truss, Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and many others.
(Reuters report, edited by Kevin Liffey and Peter Graff; with information from CNN’s Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova)
Source: CNN Brasil
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