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Sept 1 (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin will miss the funeral of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, denying the man who failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet empire full state honors granted to Boris Yeltsin.
Gorbachev, idolized in the West for enabling Eastern Europe to escape Soviet communist control but unloved at home for the chaos unleashed by his “perestroika” reforms, will be buried on Saturday after a public ceremony in the Hall of Columns in Moscow.
The Great Hall, within sight of the Kremlin, hosted the funerals of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev will receive a military honor guard, but his funeral will not be a state one.
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State television on Thursday showed Putin solemnly placing red roses next to Gorbachev’s coffin – which is left open as is traditional in Russia – at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where he died on Tuesday at the age of 91.
Putin made the sign of the cross in the Russian Orthodox manner before briefly touching the edge of the coffin.
“Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him to do it on September 3, so he decided to do it today,” Kremlin spokesman 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.
A man places a rose on a sculpture of Mikhail Gorbachev in memory of the late leader of the Soviet Union, at the “Fathers of Unity” memorial in Berlin, Germany, August 31, 2022. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner
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However, it will be a stark contrast to the funeral of Yeltsin, who was instrumental in sidelining Gorbachev when the Soviet Union collapsed and hand-picked Putin, a career KGB intelligence officer, as the most suitable man to succeed him.
When Yeltsin died in 2007, Putin declared a day of national mourning and, along with world leaders, attended a large state funeral at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine appears intended to at least partially reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev failed to prevent in 1991.
Gorbachev’s decision to let the countries of the postwar Soviet communist bloc go their own way, and East and West Germany to reunify, helped spark nationalist movements within the 15 Soviet republics that he couldn’t choke.
Five years after taking power in 2000, Putin called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Putin took more than 15 hours after Gorbachev’s death to issue a message of condolence saying that Gorbachev had had a “tremendous impact on the course of world history” and that he “deeply understood that reforms were necessary” to address the problems of the Soviet Union. in the 1980s.
Gorbachev’s foundation said the funeral would begin at 12 noon (0900 GMT), not 10 a.m. (0700 GMT) as previously announced.
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Reuters report; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Peter Graff
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