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[ 10-09-2022 ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/news/world/the-kremlins-final-snub-ex-soviet-leader-gorbachev-wont-get-state-funeral
The Kremlin's final snub: Ex-Soviet leader Gorbachev won't get state funeral
Vladimir Putin has made it his life’s work to undo Gorbachev’s legacy by rebuilding the Soviet empire with the Kremlin at its centre
The Telegraph James Kilner and Roland Oliphant Aug 31, 2022
Mikhail Gorbachev will not be granted a state funeral as the Kremlin said the former Soviet leader had been wrong to trust the “bloodthirsty” West.
Gorbachev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1985 until its breakup in 1991, died in Moscow on Tuesday night aged 91.
A funeral and memorial service will be held at the city’s House of the Unions on Saturday, his foundation said. He will be buried on the same day at the Novodevichy cemetery alongside his wife, Raisa.
The last major leader to be denied a state funeral was Nikita Khrushchev, who had been ousted and was living in enforced retirement when he died in 1971.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said earlier that no decision had yet been made on whether Vladimir Putin would attend the ceremony.
“It is still difficult to say how the procedure will take place. It depends on the wishes of relations and friends,” he told Russian media.
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But “well-placed sources” told Interfax news agency that the ceremony would not be a state funeral, in a surprising departure from protocol.
The lack of a state ceremony avoids the diplomatic difficulties of inviting foreign heads of state who oppose the war in Ukraine.
It also reflects Gorbachev’s strained relationship with Putin, who has described the collapse of the Soviet Union that the former leader presided over as a “catastrophe.”
Feted in the West for ending the Cold War, Gorbachev was loathed and mistrusted by many Russians for breaking the Soviet system and ushering in a period of economic turmoil that impoverished millions.
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Putin has made it his life’s work to undo Gorbachev’s legacy by rebuilding the Soviet empire with the Kremlin at its centre.
His invasion of Ukraine in February was partly aimed at reversing the independence the country gained when it voted to secede from the Soviet Union in a 1991 referendum.
Putin took half a day to issue a personal statement on Gorbachev’s death, with a backhanded compliment on his place in history.
He said that Gorbachev was “a politician and statesman who had a huge impact on the course of world history.”
“He deeply understood that reforms were necessary. He strove to offer his own solutions to urgent problems,” he added.
Peskov avoided direct criticism of Gorbachev, saying he “sincerely wanted to believe that… a new romantic period would start between the renewed Soviet Union and the collective West. Those romantic expectations failed to materialize. The bloodthirsty nature of our opponents has come to light, and it is good that we realized that in time.”
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But some of Putin’s closest allies were less diplomatic.
Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russia Today news outlet, offered no praise for Gorbachev and said it was time to rebuild the Kremlin’s hegemony. “Gorbachev is dead. It is time to collect the fractured (pieces),” she said.
Vladimir Solovyov, a talk-show host close to the Kremlin, described him as a “man who in six years destroyed our homeland and betrayed the whole socialist camp.”
“Did he know what he was doing? No, he didn’t,” he said on his show. “But he saw war - more than one - and each of them is on his conscience, because they were all the result of the breakup of the great Soviet Union.”
Gorbachev broadly supported Putin in the first decade of his rule, seeing him as a democrat who would continue necessary reforms.
That changed to sharp criticism in 2011, when anger at fraudulent elections and Putin’s announcement that he would return to the presidency provoked mass protests in Moscow.
Gorbachev declared himself shocked at the Kremlin’s hard-line response and warned that Russian democracy was under threat.
Over the next few years he issued increasingly despondent comments on the course the country had taken.
“Politics is more and more turning into an imitation of democracy. All power is in the hands of the authorities and the president,” he said in 2013. “The economy is monopolized. Corruption has taken on colossal proportions.”
Gorbachev had been ill for some time and had not commented publicly on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
As an instinctive peacemaker, he is unlikely to have approved.
In later life, he said his decisions in the 1980s and early ’90s - including the choice to step down rather than contest the Soviet Union’s dissolution - were motivated by a wish to avoid bloodshed. Putin has taken Russia to war five times in two decades in power.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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