According to the Kremlin spokesman, Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral due to commitments.
A public funeral will be held today for the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last Tuesday, aged 91.
The funeral – according to the Interfax agency – will take place in the well-known Hall of Columns located in the House of Trade Unions, the same place where the body of Joseph Stalin was placed for a popular pilgrimage after his death in 1953.
According to the Kremlin spokesman, Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral due to commitments.
In Berlin, according to the city-state’s interior minister, Iris Spranger, “flags will fly at half-mast today as a tribute to the city’s honorary citizen and to what he did for political change in the German Democratic Republic.”
Who was Mikhail Gobartsov?
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931. He was a Russian politician and former leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991.
He was widely praised for his instrumental role in ending the Cold War, expanding human rights in the Soviet Union, and the fall of the Eastern Bloc in eastern and central Europe.
When pro-democracy protests swept communist Eastern Europe, Gorbachev avoided resorting to violence – unlike his predecessors, who had sent tanks to quell uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
But the protests fueled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated over the next two years in chaotic fashion. Gorbachev fought in vain to prevent the collapse of the USSR.
When he became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, aged just 54, he aimed to introduce limited political and economic freedoms, but his reforms spiraled out of control.
The policy of “glasnost”, of open dialogue aimed at solving problems, allowed previously unthinkable criticism of the party and the state, while encouraging nationalists who began pushing for independence in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). and elsewhere.
Many Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the upheaval his reforms caused, seeing the resulting decline in living standards as a “too high price” to pay for “democratization”.
Economist Ruslan Greenberg, who visited Mikhail Gorbachev in the hospital on June 30, recently told Russian TV station Zvezda: “He gave us freedom, but we don’t know what to do with it.”
Read the News today and get the latest news.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.
