MOSCOW: Russians on Saturday paid their final felicitations to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, in a form held in Moscow without important fanfare and with President Vladimir Putin especially absent.
Several thousand mourners queued up to still file once Gorbachev’s open casket as it was adjoined by honor guards under the Russian flag in the major Hall of Columns.
The hall has long been used for the sepultures of high officers in Russia and was where the body of Joseph Stalin first lay in state during four days of public mourning after his death in 1953.
After several hours the pall was taken out of the hall in a procession led by Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning editor-in-chief of independent review Novaya Gazeta, which Gorbachev helped set up.
The pall was taken to Moscow’s prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery, where it was lowered into the grave to the sounds of a military band playing the Russian public hymn and a gun salutation. Gorbachev was buried next to his woman Raisa, who failed from cancer in 1999.
With Russia facing adding transnational insulation over its military action in Ukraine, numerous of those in attendance at the hall refocused on Gorbachev’s opening of the country to the rest of the world.
“It was a breath of freedom, which was lacking for a long time, an absence of fear,” 41- time-old translator Ksenia Zhupanova said at the entrance to the hall.
“I’m against shutting us out from the outside world, I’m for openness, for dialogue. This is what Mikhail Sergeyevich showed the world,” she said, using Gorbachev’s patronymic.
The mourners were of all periods, some old enough to flashback to the times of Soviet recession before Gorbachev came to power, others youthful enough to have only lived in Russia under Putin. The Kremlin had said Putin would not attend Saturday’s burial due to his “ work schedule ”.
Gorbachev failed on Tuesday at the age of 91 following a “ serious and long illness ”, the sanitarium where he was treated said.
In power between 1985 and 1991, he sought to transfigure the Soviet Union with popular reforms but ultimately touched off its demise.
One of the great political numbers of the 20th century, he was lionized in the West for helping to end the Cold War and trying to change the USSR. But numerous in Russia despised him for the profitable chaos and loss of global influence that followed the Soviet collapse.
He’d spent utmost of the last many decades out of the political spotlight and his death this week was slightly conceded in sanctioned circles in Russia.
State TV on Thursday showed images of Putin, alone, laying a bouquet of red roses near Gorbachev’s open casket at the sanitarium where he failed.
Putin had a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday, the Kremlin said, during which the two bandied Ukraine and Erdogan passed on his condolences for Gorbachev’s death. The only elderly foreign figure to attend was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who laid flowers at the casket.
“Numerous effects were demanded Central Europe to get relieved of Communism peacefully, without loss of life or bloodshed. One of them was Mikhail Gorbachev. God rest his soul!” Orban said in a post on Facebook.
