With a solemn air, Vladimir Putin left flowers next to the coffin of Mikhail Gorbachev on Thursday (1st), two days after the death of the former president of Russia. The current president observed the deceased for a few seconds – the coffin was left open, in Russian tradition – and made the sign of the cross in the Orthodox style before leaving the place.
This Thursday’s tribute, broadcast on state television, replaced Putin’s presence next Saturday (3), the official day of Gorbachev’s funeral. According to a Kremlin spokesman, the president’s work schedule does not allow him to attend the ceremony, which denotes a certain ambiguity in the relationship with the deceased.
It took Putin more than 15 hours after Gorbachev’s death to publish a contained message of condolences saying the former leader had had a “huge impact on the course of world history” and “deeply understood that reforms were necessary” to address the problems of Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Other world leaders were quicker to pay their respects, including European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The relationship between Putin and Gorbachev dates back at least to Putin’s first election, in 2000. Gorbachev considered necessary the measures he proposed to put the house in order after the confusion that followed the end of the Soviet Union. Support ceased, however, in 2006, when Gorbachev began to criticize Putin for his growing authoritarian tendencies, even calling him an idiot in a 2020 documentary.
According to the Kremlin, Gorbachev’s ceremony will be organized with the help of the state and will have elements of a national funeral, such as the presence of an honor guard. The event will be held in the famous Hall of Columns, inside the Moscow House of Trade Unions, the same place where Josef Stalin’s body was exposed after his death in 1953.
The funeral will be open to the public and Gorbachev will be buried in Moscow’s Novodevichi Cemetery, where important figures in Russian society are buried, including Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president and Gorbachev’s political rival, who died in 2007.
The ceremony will be less pompous compared to Yeltsin’s — when he 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.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine appears destined to reverse, at least in part, the collapse of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev failed to prevent in 1991. His decision to let the post-war communist bloc countries go their own way and the reunification of Germany East and West helped spark nationalist movements within the 15 Soviet republics, which he was unable or unwilling to suppress.
Five years after taking power in 2000, Putin called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
