Russia buries Gorbachev and his legacy of glasnost
2022.09.03 13:04
Russia will hold funeral rites Saturday for Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, laying to rest the man whose policies of openness and economic restructuring — glasnost and perestroika — spurred the dismantling of Communist authoritarianism in Europe but who then watched his legacy unravel as Russia returned to isolationist dictatorship under Vladimir Putin.
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Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at 91 at a hospital in Moscow, will be eulogized at a public memorial service at the House of Unions in the Russian capital and then buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery on Saturday afternoon.
Gorbachev, who is adored in the West for bringing the Cold War to an end but whose radical economic reforms made him a controversial, and at times despised, figure at home, was denied an official state funeral as was customarily held for all Soviet leaders except for Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted as Community Party premier in 1964 and loathed by his successors.
In a historical echo, Putin disdained Gorbachev and called the collapse of the Soviet Union a “catastrophe.” While other former Soviet leaders were buried within the Kremlin walls, Khrushchev was buried in Novodevichy, which will also be Gorbachev’s final resting place.
The Kremlin said Gorbachev’s ceremony would still have “elements” of a state funeral, such as honorary guards, and that the state was helping to organize it.
Putin, however, will not be in attendance, in a snub that reflects the Russian leader’s disdain for Gorbachev’s rapprochement with the West, his political and economic reforms, support for free speech and government transparency and, most of all, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
On Thursday, Putin paid a muted tribute to Gorbachev by visiting the hospital where the politician’s body remained after his death. In a clip broadcast by government television channels, Putin could be seen leaving a bouquet of red roses by the coffin, bowing and then departing the mourning hall of the Central Clinical Hospital without uttering a word.
Saturday’s memorial ceremony, which is open to the public, will take place in the Pillar Hall of the old Soviet House of Unions, which was also the site of memorials for Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev will then be buried next to his wife, Raisa, who died in 1999.
Gorbachev’s farewell is in stark contrast to the burial of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia and the only other national leader who died during Putin’s presidency. Yeltsin, who handpicked Putin as his successor, was honored with a televised farewell ceremony held at the central Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior when he died in 2007.
Putin declared the day of Yeltsin’s funeral to be a day of national mourning.
Putin has often criticized Gorbachev’s legacy, albeit while avoiding personal attacks, and famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
“A statesman who will forever remain in the history of our country — many argue about the role he played,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the day after Gorbachev died. Peskov said Gorbachev wrongly hoped that “an eternal romantic period would begin between the new Soviet Union and the West.”
“No romantic honeymoon happened,” Peskov said. “The bloodthirstiness of our opponents showed itself.”
Gorbachev, who generally avoided any direct personal criticism of Putin, was reportedly distraught over the current Russian president’s decision to invade Ukraine.
Pavel Palazhchenko, an aide and interpreter who worked alongside Gorbachev for nearly four decades, said that in one of their last phone conversations Gorbachev seemed “shocked and bewildered” by the state of the country he once ruled.
“It’s not just the [military] operation that started on Feb. 24, but the entire evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine over the past years that was really, really a big blow to him,” Palazhchenko told Reuters in an interview. “It really crushed him emotionally and psychologically.”
Alexei Venediktov, a prominent liberal media figure who spoke to Gorbachev by phone in July, also said the former Soviet leader opposed the war and was hurt by the undoing of his life’s work by Putin, who had left civic freedoms and free press in ashes.
“I can tell you that Gorbachev is upset,” Venediktov told Russian Forbes magazine.
Unlike Yeltstin’s funeral, which was attended by dozens of heads of state and other foreign dignitaries, including former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Gorbachev’s ceremony will be attended by relatively few such guests given the severe tensions over ongoing war in Ukraine.
The State Department said Friday that U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan would attend the funeral. President Biden, along with hundreds of other officials from countries Russia now deems “unfriendly,” have been barred from entering the country.
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