Putin’s state funeral snub for Gorbachev
VLADIMIR Putin looks set to deliver a final snub to Mikhail Gorbachev by denying him a state funeral.
The Russian president took 12 hours to issue a statement of backhanded compliments about the former Soviet leader’s ‘huge impact on world history’.
Gorbachev, who played a major part in ending the Cold War, died in Moscow on Tuesday aged 91. His health had been in decline for many years and he had been admitted to hospital for a kidney ailment.
While lionised in the West, Gorbachev is reviled by many in Russia for presiding over the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, an event Putin describes as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’.
The state-linked Interfax news agency, quoting two ‘ well- placed’ sources, said ‘there are no plans to organise a state funeral’ for the 1990 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The funeral is set to be held this Saturday at Moscow’s House of Unions where Joseph Stalin’s body was put on display following his death in 1953. Gorbachev will be buried at Mosc o w ’ s NovoDyevitchiye cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, according to the TASS news agency. But Putin’s distrust of the West and his efforts to seemingly rebuild the USSR look likely to deny Gorbachev a full state send-off. Another of Putin’s predecessors, Boris Yeltsin, was given a state burial following a heart attack in April 2007.
In his telegram of condolences, the Kremlin leader said: ‘Mikhail Gorbachev was a politician and statesman who had a huge impact on the course of world history. He led our country during a period of complex, dramatic changes, large-scale foreign polturned icy, economic and social challenges. He deeply understood that reforms were necessary, he strove to offer his own solutions to urgent problems. I will especially note the great humanitarian, charitable, educational activities that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev has been conducting in recent years.’
Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, described Gorbachev as an ‘extraordinary’ statesman but hit out at his ‘impulse’ to end the Cold War in the hope that ‘an eternal romance’ would start with the West. ‘This romanticism out to be wrong. It’s good that we realised this in time and understood it,’ he said.
But yesterday tributes poured in. US President Joe Biden hailed Gorbachev as ‘a man of remarkable vision’ and France’s Emmanuel Macron described him as ‘a man of peace who opened up a path of liberty’.
UN chief Antonio Guterres called him ‘ a one- of- a- kind statesman who changed the course of history’.
debt of gratitude the world owes Mikhail Gorbachev is incalculable. He ended the Cold War without bloodshed, dismantled the Soviet Union – paving the way for freedom in Eastern Europe – and oversaw communism’s collapse. In Russia, he replaced totalitarianism with democracy, and oppression with openness. How tragic these dreams are being crushed under the tyrannous heel of Vladimir Putin.