Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral and burial plans appear to be a snapshot of his legacy, both as a Soviet political leader and as the architect of the demise of the USSR.
On Saturday the farewells will begin with the public exhibition of his remains in the House of Trade Unions, where all the communist leaders from Vladimir Lenin to Konstantin Chernenko were veiled. But he will not be exhumed in the Kremlin wall, like many of them, but in the Novodevichy Convent cemetery, where his wife Raisa and another Soviet reformist leader, Nikita Khrushchev, are buried. It is not clear if Moscow will decree a state funeral for the last president of the USSR or if there will be a parade through the streets of the city.
Gorbachev is a divisive and often hated figure in Russia itself. The state he led, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. But he was praised on Tuesday by some world leaders, including US President Joe Biden, for being open to democratic change. Others criticized the efforts of the Soviet authorities to crush dissent in the countries under his leadership.
“It would be easy to believe that the enormous achievements that he achieved in reaching out to the West, including the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first agreement to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the USSR, were inevitable results. . These achievements would have been unthinkable without the courage and determination with which Gorbachev showed openness, and without the trust he earned from Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush,” said US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
In his opinion “Gorby”, as he was codified in the West, “never lost faith in the transformative potential of that approach, even when some of his greatest achievements were undermined. In 2018 he wrote: ‘Is it too late to resume dialogue and negotiations? I don’t want to lose hope. We must not resign ourselves, we must not give up’. He was right. His life is a clear example of all that can be achieved when we transform those ideals into reality.”
