Because he is “too busy,” Vladimir Putin will not attend Mikhail Gorbachev’s burial on Saturday, a last insult to the former Soviet leader who was also denied a state funeral.
Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated: “Unfortunately, the President’s work schedule will not enable him (to attend) the goodbye service and burial on September 3.”
Following Gorbachev’s death on Tuesday at the age of 91, Putin was shown on Russian state television placing a bunch of red roses next to his open coffin at the hospital.
He made the sign of the cross after pausing for a little period of silence, bowing his head and momentarily placing his hand on the coffin.
Despite a massive outpouring of condolences from the West after Gorbachev’s passing, sentiment was far more subdued in Russia since many people despised him for having started the fall of the Soviet Union.
Although the fall of the Soviet Union brought independence to nations like Ukraine, it also left Russia’s economy in disarray and resulted in a loss in its global importance.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that his work schedule means that he is unable to attend the funeral. Pictured: Putin bows his head as he pays his respects to last Soviet leader Gorbachev, at his open casket
Despite a huge outpouring of tributes from the West after Gorbachev’s death, reaction was much more muted in Russia, as many scorned him after he triggered the demise of the Soviet Union. Pictured: Putin and Gorbachev
In the image, Putin stands in front of Gorbachev’s open coffin with a somber expression on his face.
In another letter of condolences, distributed by the Kremlin, Putin called Gorbachev a “politician and statesman who had a major effect on the path of global history.”
He oversaw our nation through a time of complicated, dramatic changes, extensive foreign policy, and economic and social issues, said Putin.
The burial service for Gorbachev will take place in the Moscow Hall of Columns on Saturday.
High-ranking leaders have traditionally utilized it for burial rites, notably Joseph Stalin in 1953.
Then, Gorbachev will be buried alongside his late wife Raisa in the Novedevichy cemetery in Moscow. Raisa passed away in 1999.
Pictured: Putin looks at a photograph of Gorbachev, Russia’s last Soviet leader, who died aged 91 on Tuesday
Despite Gorbachev triggering the end of the Soviet Union, Putin has spent much of the last 20 years reversing his legacy. Pictured: Putin places a hand on Gorbachev’s open casket
The burial service for Gorbachev will take place in the Moscow Hall of Columns on Saturday. Then, he will be laid to rest next to his wife Raisa at the Novedevichy cemetery in Moscow. Gorbachev and Raisa in 1992 are seen.
A guard of honor and other “features of a state funeral,” according to the Kremlin spokesperson, would be included in Gorbachev’s memorial service, which will be planned with government assistance.
Putin, who has referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as the biggest geopolitical calamity of the 20th century, has spent a significant portion of his 20 years in office undoing some of Gorbachev’s legacy.
Critics claim that this has undermined Gorbachev’s attempts to introduce “glasnost,” or openness, to the political system by clamping down on independent media and political opposition.
Additionally, Putin has aimed to reestablish Russian dominance in Ukraine via a full-scale conflict. Ukraine is one of the nations that gained independence when the Soviet Union broke apart.
Pictured: Putin also made a sign of the cross after paying his respects to Gorbachev in Russia
Putin, who has referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as the biggest geopolitical calamity of the 20th century, has spent a significant portion of his 20 years in office undoing some of Gorbachev’s legacy. Included in this is the initiation of a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, one of the nations that gained independence when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Gorbachev and Putin are shown.
What a cruel irony that Putin was made possible by Gorbachev, who spared the West from nuclear Armageddon! Cold War expert MAX HASTINGS writes
Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Russian president in contemporary history to have rock-star status overseas, yet at home, he was only met with disdain and contempt.
After decades in which the Soviet Union’s main export had been terror, “Gorby”—immediately identifiable by the port-wine birthmark on his head—sought to make his nation a weaker but friendlier member of the world community.
His catchphrases, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), as well as Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that he was “a guy one could do business with,” entered Western mythology.
But Gorbachev was unsuccessful, and Vladimir Putin’s creation of a tsardom in the twenty-first century is a notable legacy of his failure.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the only leader of Russia in modern history to achieve rock-star popularity abroad, yet he found himself rewarded only by hatred and contempt at home
The Russian people overwhelmingly favor this, but it has developed a similar intolerance for dissent as did the Soviet politburo. Almost everyone who he sought to lead into a new world has denigrated Gorbachev, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 91.
And Putin’s domination demonstrates how many Russians liked the old world, when their country was seen as magnificent while being abjectly impoverished and oppressed.
As a devoted apparatchik of the Soviet Communist Party for the majority of his life, Gorbachev’s abrupt appearance in 1985 as a champion of enlightenment was all the more unexpected — and first implausible — in the eyes of the West.
Hitler’s forces swept over his country with fire and sword a decade after he was born in the town of Privolnoye in southern Russia.
The great Stalin was honored in some of his first school writings, along with other topics like “our fighting glory” and “the ecstasy of our youth.”
He was raised in a culture that celebrated its tyrant, Joseph Stalin, for winning the Great Patriotic War while carelessly dismissing Stalin’s actual record as a serial killer.
Gorbachev’s youthful skill in aiding his father, who ran a combine harvester on a state farm, won him the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, which honored significant acts and contributions to the Soviet state and society. He got accepted as a law student at Moscow State University, which was the first step on his journey to better things. There, he followed in the footsteps of his father and grandpa by joining the Communist Party, obtaining the necessary credentials for power and influence.
He first met Raisa Titarenko, a stunning Siberian railway worker’s daughter, in 1951 at a dancing lesson in the city. Titarenko was already well-known among her peers for acting as haughtily as any tsar’s daughter, and she would later come to be despised by her fellow Russians for her queenly behavior as the president’s consort.
Almost everyone who he sought to lead into a new world has denigrated Gorbachev, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 91. And Putin’s domination demonstrates how many Russians loved the old world, when their country was seen to be wonderful while being abjectly impoverished and oppressed.
Before the young Raisa, a philosophy student, descended even to notice Mikhail, it took weeks of devoted wooing. She subsequently said that she had fallen for him because she found him to be “trustworthy,” not because of his good looks or charisma.
This was a more remarkable recommendation than it may seem during the Soviet period since it implied a brilliant young man who was sure to succeed due of his unwavering commitment and mindless obedience, which are crucial characteristics of a Soviet communist.
In September 1953, the pair was hitched. For the remainder of her life, Mikhail loved the strong Raisa. His native area of Stavropol was where the young couple relocated when he graduated in 1955, together with their daughter Irina.
After that, he built a career as a party official and administrator under the guidance of Yuri Andropov, the longtime KGB director who ultimately ascended to become Russia’s president in the early 1980s.
In 1978, Gorbachev was appointed Secretary of the Central Committee, and less than two years later, he entered the Politburo.
In his middle years, Gorbachev somehow and somewhere started to see that his nation and its political system were failures hidden behind an iron curtain of nuclear weapons, dishonesty, and brutality. The expense of the armaments race and the death hand of collectivism had the Soviet economy on its knees (the ownership of land and means of production by the state).
Only two alleged victories were Russian prowess in the space race with the United States and a substantial military apparatus. But if the nation was unable to produce an electric toaster or an automobile that people outside of Cuba would be eager to purchase, what good were these things?
In his memoirs, Gorbachev describes how he and Raisa strolled into the garden of their dacha outside of Moscow on the evening of March 11, 1985, hoping to be safe from the KGB’s microphones, which eavesdropped on even the most powerful people in the nation.
He had been chosen to succeed Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Party that day. They engaged in a lengthy and sincere discussion about the country he would soon run.
He claims they agreed that drastic change must come, saying to his wife: ‘There’s no alternative. The country can’t go on as it is.’
Russia could boast only two supposed triumphs — its prowess in the space race against the United States, and a vast military machine. But what availed these things, if the country could not manufacture an electric toaster or a car that anyone other than Cubans would be willing to buy?
The Soviet Union’s attempts to keep up with President Ronald Reagan’s armaments buildup had brought it to the verge of economic catastrophe. Unfathomably wealthy America had increased the stakes in the destructive Cold War poker game, exposing the ideological and financial failure of communism.
Gorbachev and a few other like-minded individuals in the Kremlin realized that Russia’s East European empire could not be maintained, just as the British were compelled to acknowledge in the decades following World War II that their Empire had grown into an unaffordable drain on the “mother country”.
The employment of tanks, firing squads, and the fear of deportation to the Gulag was no longer sufficient to maintain Moscow’s rule in Poland, Hungary, or any of the other satellite governments.
Gorbachev tried to create a myth of himself as a champion of freedom and peace from the moment he took control of the Kremlin until he was elderly and in disgrace. Facts contradict such a viewpoint. He was a seasoned Communist official who had lived his whole life in the confines of the most repressive political structure.
He was clearly straining in his early years of leadership, both at home and abroad, to find a path ahead for his nation and to escape the burden of both his own and Russia’s pasts. When questioned about human rights during a visit to Paris, he said fiercely, “The Soviet Union can put everyone in its place if it has to.”
Gorbachev responded the same as every Soviet leader since Lenin when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down a year after he entered office: he hid behind a wall of silence and falsehoods.
But after making the brave choice to seek detente with the West, he became frustrated by how cautious and even cynical people first responded to his approaches.
He asked to know why China had “most preferred country” status in trade discussions with the U.S. but Russia did not during a trip to Washington immediately after the Tiananmen Square tragedy in Beijing. What am I supposed to do, he mocked angrily. ‘Kill a couple hundred people in Red Square?’
However, it was his candor, humor, and easy charm on show at their two summit meetings with Ronald Reagan, the second of which took place in Reykjavik in October 1986, as well as his pledges of complete nuclear disarmament that ultimately astounded and started to win over the West.
His actions also supported what he said. Eduard Shevardnadze, a liberal from Georgia, took over as foreign minister from the seasoned Andrei Gromyko.
He made the historic announcement that all Soviet forces would begin to leave Afghanistan in February 1988 and that Moscow would cease trying to meddle in the internal affairs of other Warsaw Pact nations the next year.
These statements were the catalyst for a series of seismic upheavals that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate reunification of Germany as well as the overthrow of communist governments across Eastern Europe. Gorbachev received the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize as compensation for all of this.
In those years, he rose to become the most well-known Russian in the world, swarmed by Western admiring crowds ready to celebrate a Soviet leader who had removed the terrifying cloak of nuclear threat. Numerous political prisoners were freed by him from the Gulag, including famed scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov.
Hitler’s forces swept over his country with fire and sword a decade after he was born in the town of Privolnoye in southern Russia. The great Stalin was honored in some of his first school writings, along with other topics like “our fighting glory” and “the ecstasy of our youth.” In the image up top, he is with his grandparents.
During the Stalinist period, tens of thousands of victims of humiliation and murder underwent public rehabilitation. Russians began to enjoy unparalleled journalistic and personal freedom as of 1988.
Because they had been duped by Moscow far too often in the past, Western governments, including Margaret Thatcher’s, were hesitant to see that Gorbachev represented a really new spirit in the East in the early years of his leadership.
However, after Gorbachev’s sincerity was made clear, both Reagan and Thatcher truly warmed to him, despite the British prime minister’s somewhat sluggish understanding of his humor.
Gorbachev was aware, nevertheless, that a lot of regular Russians detested him. Instead of just being the inheritor of decades of Soviet foolishness and failure, they regarded him as the mastermind behind the spectacular collapse of their currency and economy.
He enjoyed telling the tale of an irate customer in a food line who turns to the rest of the people and declares, “I’ve had enough of this.” I’m going to murder Gorbachev,” she says before vanishing.
He leaves angry and returns to the bread line after 30 minutes. What happened? demand his neighbors. The line to do it was much longer than this one, he replies groggily.
Tragically, Gorbachev discovered that he had nothing else to replace the old Soviet system after making the courageous choice to face its collapse.
While his admirers praised him in London, New York, and Paris, citizens at home only witnessed the demise of whole businesses, the devastation of their pensions, and shortages of every sort of item. The youth first seemed appreciative of their new freedoms, but their elders simply noticed that they were unable to consume such things.
Gorbachev was chosen as the Soviet Union’s first president in 1990. Yet this ostensibly pinnacle moment signaled the start of his loss of power over his nation. The Baltic nations were the first Soviet republics to secede after Stalin’s 1945 creation of the East European empire, followed by Central Asian states, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Numerous Russians, especially the leaders of the military and security apparatus, were horrified and incensed by these occurrences. A handful of conspirators, including the chief of the KGB, launched a messy coup in August 1991 while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea and put him under house arrest.
Boris Yeltsin, the bear-like man who gathered supporters in Moscow against the reactionaries and defeated them after a few days of spectacular street scenes, including an iconic speech delivered from the top of a tank, turned out to be the hero of the hour.
In the midst of resounding sighs of relief from governments in the West, whose people had been traumatized by the unrest in Moscow, Gorbachev flew back to the capital and resumed his position in the Kremlin.
But the unpopularity of his reign inside his own country had severely weakened him and left him in terrible health. When Yeltsin struck an agreement with the heads of Belarus and Ukraine to create a union of autonomous nations under his authority in Russia in December 1991, this became clear. Gorbachev was left in the open, acting as the president of a defunct USSR.
He announced his resignation on Christmas Day, accusing everyone in his own nation and the West of betraying him by failing to provide him with the backing he needed to reform Russia.
Actually, it was doubtful that anybody who oversaw the nation during the years when it had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet regime would succeed.
Gorbachev deservedly received praise for bringing an end to the Cold War, but he lacked a convincing and politically viable plan for the future of Russia. He had a lot of self-confidence, which made him oblivious to his own shortcomings and give him false ideas of his grandeur.
He said in his autobiography, “I had the qualities of a leader from a young age. People continued pushing me ahead, whether it was at school, on the farm, or in college, even though I didn’t particularly want to be the boss. It everything seemed quite natural. I never considered doing anything else.
Even in the West today, it is fashionable to mock Gorbachev’s failure, but I once had the honor of meeting Gorbachev when I was working as a newspaper editor in 1991. I remember his warmth and charm, as well as the wave of gratitude that almost all of my generation felt towards this Russian who had removed the menacing threat of nuclear war from our world.
In the 1990s, the U.S. developed a grotesquely triumphalist stance as a result of its joy over winning the Cold War. Washington humiliated Moscow repeatedly because it believed that Russia was unable to fight back.
We are still paying for that decade of foolishness today because Vladimir Putin and his people have a bitter grudge towards the West that is based on damaged national pride. Even now, their nation is a social and economic disaster, rife with institutional corruption. But as we can see in Ukraine, it still has the ability to cause a lot of difficulty for the rest of the globe, and many Russians find it enjoyable to engage in this.
Gorbachev recently criticized Putin, his successor, for choosing a “ruinous and dismal path,” which is a reasonable accusation. However, Russians benefit from their leader’s misadventures in Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine by seeing the amusing sight of an attentive, quivering globe.
They see this as being far better than Gorbachev’s pitiful pandering.
He received an insulting 5% of the popular vote when he campaigned for president of Russia in the 1996 election. Following that, he made infrequent efforts to return to the political scene, which earned him acclaim overseas but only scorn at home.
His beloved Raisa passed away from leukemia in 1999, which was a devastating blow to him. He constantly recognized her effect on his life and politics, which is another reason why most Russians despise him.
The Cold War should be ended with a whimper rather than a boom, and the West should continue to appreciate and be grateful to Mikhail Gorbachev for that. When compared to Vladimir Putin, whose personal fortune is said to be worth up to £170 billion, it appears to be much to his credit that he passed away, if not in poverty, then at least with minimal riches.
Even though Gorbachev wasn’t a perfect person, he made a significant contribution to the world.
There may yet be a day when the majority of Russians realize that Vladimir Putin’s belligerence is taking a heavy toll not only on the international order but also on everyday Russians themselves, and that Mikhail Gorbachev’s stumbling advance towards freedom had more virtue than they ever acknowledged.
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Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, Max Hastings’ most recent book, will be out on September 29.