The Russian government will not hold state funeral for one of the country’s most celebrated figures – Mikhail Gorbachev.
According to Gorbachev Foundation, speaking to Interfax News Agency, the noted Cold War hero will be laid to rest on Saturday at Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow, close to where the body of Raisa, his wife, rests. The last Soviet Union leader died in Moscow on Tuesday at the age of 91.
The traditional way to honor a statesman in death is to offer them state funeral. But Gorbachev was not a proper statesman, at least as far as Russian President Vladimir Putin and his kitchen cabinet is concerned.
Putin’s revisionist attempt to re-write history is the stuff of strongmen – which he is. And so denying Gorbachev state funeral is not exactly surprising.
Gorbachev did not believe in God. He believed in his country and Raisa. His desire to introduce neo-liberalism in the Soviet Union led to the end of Cold War which ushered in globalization across the world
His appointment as the General Secretary of the U.S.S.R marked what would become the era of sweeping reforms and the beginning of the end of official communism dictatorship.
When he invited the slogan “perestroika” – restructuring – most officials within the Central Committee thought he was out of his mind. “Restructuring” the established U.S.S.R domestic policy ideology was hitherto unheard of.
It was Gorbachev who introduced liberal reforms that turned Soviet Union from a violent communist dictatorship to something close to a constitutional democracy.
He believed Soviet Union could become something different from what Joseph Stalin imagined: land of the free. But, like all politicians, he left office – unceremoniously – with blood in his hands.
It was his regime that meted out violence on pro-independence protesters in Georgia, Latvia and Lithuania. Moreover, he did not challenge Russia’s violent expansionist agenda on Ukraine even when the high moral ground on which his philosophy and politics rested demanded so.
