According to the Kremlin, it is the Russian president’s busy work schedule that makes Vladimir Putin unable to attend Saturday’s funeral. However, the announcement is seen by many as marking Putin against the policies pursued by Gorbachev – and which ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, according to the BBC.
Mikhail Gorbachev is buried in the historic Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow next to his wife Raisa Gorbacheva, who died in 1999. The cemetery next to the Moscow River also houses a large number of famous Russians, including the first president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, the writer Anton Chekhov and the deposed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev .
Before the funeral, Mikhail Gorbachev, just like former Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, has been lying on the lap of the parade in the funeral hall in the House of Unions in Moscow.
Vladimir Putin visited the hospital where Gorbachev died and after his death also sent a telegram expressing his condolences, according to the Kremlin. The Russian president then wrote that Mikhail Gorbachev had a “great impact on the course of world history” – but Putin has also called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century”, according to the BBC.