Russia buries Gorbachev, with a shrug

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader beloved of the West who lived long enough to see all the reforms he had championed in his homeland undone, was buried yesterday without state honours or the presence of the current Kremlin incumbent.

Gorbachev became a hero in the West for allowing eastern Europe to shake off more than four decades of Soviet communist control, letting East and West Germany reunite, and forging arms control treaties with the United States.

But when the 15 Soviet republics seized on the same freedoms to demand their independence, Gorbachev was powerless to prevent the collapse of the 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.

Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday aged 91, has been granted a public send-off.  Muscovites yesterday allowed to view his coffin in the imposing Hall of Columns, within sight of the Kremlin, where previous Soviet leaders have been mourned.

But it was little surprise that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a long-time KGB intelligence officer who called the Soviet Union's collapse a "geopolitical catastrophe", denied Gorbachev full state honours and said he was too busy to attend the funeral.

The many Western heads of state and government who would certainly have come 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.

Hundreds of mourners lined up to quietly file past Gorbachev's open casket as it was flanked by honour guards under the Russian flag.

Gorbachev was buried in Moscow's Novodevichy cemetery, alongside his adored wife Raisa, who predeceased him by a painful 23 years.