Gorbachev dies, lives on: but Putin says no state funeral for the last Soviet-era titan

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: Russian President Vladimir Putin, who started the Ukraine war in February 2022 apparently to re-annex the breakaway parts of the former Soviet Union, has denied full state honors to the last Soviet-era leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, because of his “busy schedule.”

Gorbachev, who passed away on Tuesday at 91, will be buried on Saturday after a public ceremony in Moscow’s Hall of Columns.

In the past, the grand hall, close to the Kremlin, hosted the funerals of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, and Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev will be given only a military guard of honor, but his funeral will not be a state one.

Many Russian leaders continue to blame Gorbachev, who was the Soviet Union’s President from 1990 to 1991, for the disintegration of the USSR. They sidelined him, particularly since he was very popular in the West and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1990) for his efforts to end the Cold War with the USA.

Boris Yeltsin succeeded Gorbachev as the Russian President (1991-99). His successor, Vladimir Putin, accorded Yeltsin a state funeral in 2007.

Putin, who issued a formal message of condolence 15 hours after the death, will stay away from Gorbachev’s funeral, the media reported.

The Russian President said that Gorbachev had had a “huge impact on the course of world history” and “deeply understood that reforms were necessary” to tackle the problems of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

They idolized Gorbachev in the West for allowing Eastern Europe to escape Soviet communist control. But many in Russia despised him for the chaos that his “perestroika” reforms unleashed and the collapse of the Soviet Union that led to the re-emergence of 15 countries.

State television on Thursday showed President Putin solemnly placing red roses beside Gorbachev’s coffin, left open as is traditional in Russia, in Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where the former Soviet leader died.

Putin made a sign of the cross in Russian Orthodox fashion 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 spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

He said Gorbachev’s ceremony would have “elements” of a state funeral and that the state was helping to organize it.

Apparently, Putin wants to avoid the occasion as his inconclusive Ukraine war has failed to bring glory to him even after six months of conflict, particularly as he had boasted the war would be over in 48 hours.

It will be a marked contrast to the funeral of Yeltsin, who was instrumental in side-lining Gorbachev as the Soviet Union fell apart and hand-picked Putin, a career KGB intelligence officer, as the man most suited to succeed him.

When Yeltsin died in 2007, Putin declared a national day of mourning and, alongside world leaders, attended a grand state funeral in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Russia’s intervention in Ukraine appears aimed at reversing, at least in part, the collapse of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev failed to prevent in 1991.

Gorbachev’s decision to let the countries of the post-war Soviet communist bloc go their own way and East and West Germany reunify helped to trigger nationalist movements within the 15 Soviet republics that he was powerless to quell.

Five years after taking power in 2000, Putin called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.