Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral ceremony of the last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, which is scheduled for Saturday, the Kremlin spokesman said on Thursday.
“We know that the main ceremony will be on September 3, as well as the funeral, but the president’s schedule does not allow him to be there,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.
Peskov said Putin went to Moscow Central Clinical Hospital today, where Gorbachev died on Tuesday, to honor him and “lay flowers next to his coffin”.
Kremlin spokesman said Gorbachev’s departure “elements of a state funeral”, including a “guard of honour”, and that these will be organized “with the assistance of the state”.
The TASS news agency reported that the former head of state will be buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, next to his wife.
Gorbachev, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, died Tuesday at the age of 91 while being treated at the hospital, according to his office.
The former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) promoted a series of reforms between 1985 and 1991 that led to the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the liberation of Eastern European nations from Russian rule and the end of decades of the Russian nuclear showdown with the United States and Western countries.
Gorbachev’s legacy is controversial in Russia, as the liberal sectors attribute the strengthening of civil liberties, namely that of speech which was severely restricted during the communist dictatorship, but at the same time, by some nationalist leaders, decisions that led to the end of the Empire. Soviet.
Source: DN
