Mikhail Gorbachev buried in Moscow in funeral snubbed by Putin

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday (August 30) at the age of 91, in Moscow.

Russians who came for a last look at former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday mourned both the man and his policies that gave them hope. President Vladimir Putin claimed to be too busy to attend.

Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at age 91, launched drastic reforms that helped end the Cold War. But he also precipitated the breakup of the Soviet Union, which Putin had called the 20th century’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe.”

The farewell viewing of his body in an ostentatious hall near the Kremlin was shadowed by the awareness that the openness Gorbachev championed has been stifled under Putin.

“I want to thank him for my childhood of freedom, which we don’t have today,” said mourner Ilya, a financial services worker in his early 30s who declined to give his last name.

“I am a son of perestroika,” he said, using the Russian word for Gorbachev’s reform, or reconstruction, initiatives.

“I’d like us to have more people like him in our history,” said another mourner, Yulia Prividennaya. “We need such politicians to settle the situation in the world when it’s on the verge of World War III.”

After the viewing, Gorbachev’s body was buried next to his wife Raisa in Novodevichy cemetery, where many prominent Russians lie, including the post-Soviet country’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, whose struggle for power with Gorbachev sped up the collapse of the Soviet Union.