As fair-and-balanced as it gets told these days (2 from Aljazeera)
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Russia bids farewell to last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
In power between 1985 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to transform the Soviet Union with democratic reforms.
Russia laid to rest the last leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev in a Moscow ceremony but without the fanfare of a state funeral and with the glaring absence of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Gorbachev, the Soviet leader beloved of the West, lived long enough to see all the reforms he had championed in Russia undone. He was buried on Saturday without state honours or the presence of Putin.
Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday aged 91, has been granted a public funeral: Muscovites were able to view his coffin in the imposing Hall of Columns, within sight of the Kremlin, where previous Soviet leaders have been mourned.
But Putin, a longtime KGB intelligence officer who called the Soviet Union’s collapse a “geopolitical catastrophe”, denied Gorbachev a full state funeral ceremony. Putin also said he was too busy to attend.
In power between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev sought to transform the Soviet Union with democratic reforms.
In Russia, many blame him for letting go of the Soviet empire and with it the country’s position as a global power.
‘Gorby’
Gorbachev became a hero in the West – where he was affectionately known as “Gorby” – for allowing Eastern Europe to shake off more than four decades of Soviet communist control.
He also let East and West Germany reunite, and forged arms control treaties with the United States, which lifted the “Iron Curtain” and ended the Cold War.
His achievements were recognised with the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
But when the 15 Soviet republics seized on the same freedoms to demand their independence, Gorbachev was powerless to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, six years after he had become its leader.
For that, and the economic chaos that his “perestroika” liberalisation programme unleashed, many Russians could not forgive him.
Western heads of state and government leaders who would certainly have come for the funeral will also be absent, kept away by the chasm in East-West relations that has been opened up by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
Instead, an unknown number of Russian people filed past the open coffin of the Nobel Peace laureate, whose guard of honour provided an “element” of a state occasion, according to the Kremlin.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban traveled to Moscow for the funeral to pay his respects and was accompanied by a delegation. There were no plans for Orban to meet Putin.
“As far as we know, he will only fly in to say goodbye to Gorbachev. There were no desires for meetings,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state news agency RIA Novosti.
‘Shocked and bewildered’
The funeral will all be a far cry from the national day of mourning and state ceremony in Moscow’s principal cathedral that was accorded in 2007 to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin was instrumental in side-lining Gorbachev as the Soviet Union fell apart and later hand-picked Putin as his own successor.
Gorbachev was buried like Yeltsin in Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery, alongside his adored wife Raisa, who predeceased him by a painful 23 years.
The invasion of Ukraine in February was arguably the last nail in the coffin of Gorbachev’s legacy, one his longtime interpreter and aide said had left him “shocked and bewildered” in the final months of his life.
“It’s not just the operation that started on February 24, but the entire evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine over the past years that was really, really a big blow to him. It really crushed him, emotionally and psychologically,” Pavel Palazhchenko told Reuters news agency in an interview.
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‘A big blow’: Mikhail Gorbachev died shocked by Ukraine war
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow’s worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter has said.
Pavel Palazhchenko, who worked with the late Soviet president for 37 years and was at his side at numerous United States-Soviet summits, spoke to Gorbachev a few weeks ago by phone and said he and others had been struck by how traumatised he was by events in Ukraine.
“It’s not just the [special military] operation that started on February 24, but the entire evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine over the past years that was really, really a big blow to him. It really crushed him emotionally and psychologically,” Palazhchenko said in an interview.
“It was very obvious to us in our conversations with him that he was shocked and bewildered by what was happening for all kinds of reasons. He believed not just in the closeness of the Russian and Ukrainian people, he believed that those two nations were intermingled.”
President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on February 24 in what he called a “special military operation” to ensure Russia’s security against an expanding NATO military alliance and to protect Russian speakers.
Kyiv says it is defending itself from an unprovoked, imperial-style war of aggression. The West, meanwhile, imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow to try to get Putin to pull his forces back, something he shows no sign of doing.
Family ties to Ukraine
In photographs of 1980s summits with US President Ronald Reagan, the bald, moustachioed figure of Palazhchenko can be seen time and again at Gorbachev’s side, leaning in to capture and relay every word.
Now 73, he is well placed to know the late politician’s state of mind in the period before he died, having seen him in recent months and been in touch with Gorbachev’s daughter, Irina.
Gorbachev, who was 91 when he died on Tuesday from an unspecified illness, had family connections to Ukraine, said Palazhchenko.
He was speaking at the Moscow headquarters of the Gorbachev Foundation where he works, and where Gorbachev kept an office dominated by a giant portrait of his late wife Raisa whose father was from Ukraine.
Video Duration 24 minutes 40 seconds
Conflicted on Ukraine
While in office, Gorbachev tried to keep the Soviet Union’s 15 republics, including Ukraine, together but failed after reforms he set in motion emboldened many to demand independence.
Soviet forces used deadly force in some instances in the dying days of the USSR against civilians. Politicians in Lithuania and Latvia recalled those events with horror after Gorbachev’s death, saying they still blamed him for the bloodshed.
Palazhchenko said Gorbachev believed in solving problems solely via political means, and had either not known about some of those bloody episodes beforehand or “extremely reluctantly” authorised the use of force to prevent chaos.
Gorbachev’s position on Ukraine was complex and contradictory in his own mind, said Palazhchenko, because the late politician still believed in the idea of the Soviet Union.
“Of course, in his heart the kind of mental map for him and for most people of his political generation is still a kind of imagined country that includes most of the former Soviet Union,” said Palazhchenko.
But Gorbachev would not have waged war to restore the now defunct country he presided over from 1985-1991, he suggested. “Of course, I can’t imagine him saying ‘this is it and I will do whatever to impose it’. No.”
While Gorbachev believed his duty was to show Putin respect and support, his former interpreter said he spoke out publicly when he disagreed with him – such as on the treatment of the media.
But he took a decision not to “provide a running commentary” on Ukraine beyond approving a statement in February that called for an early end to hostilities and for humanitarian concerns to be addressed.
‘Failed romanticism’
While conceding that some Russians and people across the former Soviet empire held extremely negative views of Gorbachev for the economic and geopolitical tumult that followed the 1991 collapse of the USSR, Palazhchenko argued Gorbachev’s legacy was substantial.
He had not only helped end the Cold War and reduced the risk of nuclear war, he said, but voluntarily dismantled totalitarianism inside the Soviet Union and gave Russia a chance for freedom and democracy.
“I think that he did remain optimistic about Russia’s future,” despite his own legacy being “mangled” and what he regarded as “unfair criticism”, said Palazhchenko.
“He believed that the people of Russia are very talented people and once they are given a chance, maybe a second chance, that that talent … will show.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday referred to Gorbachev’s view that the end of the Cold War would lead to warmer relations between the Soviet Union and the West as a “failed romanticism”.
Palazhchenko said he and his colleagues now face the task of going through Gorbachev’s papers and books at the late politician’s state-owned dacha outside Moscow, as there was lots of material that had not yet been systematically catalogued in his archive.
Visibly angered by criticism of Gorbachev since his death by some people on social media whom he called “haters”, Palazhchenko said his former employer thought history would judge him rightly.
“He liked to say that history is a fickle lady. I think that he believed and that he expected that the final verdict will be positive for him.”
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