While Putin was absent from the funeral, the Russian state was not. “It is the blame game, the slanderous, ignorant accusations, that he rejected. “He did understand that there were quite a few people who blamed him in Russia for the dissolution of the Soviet Union he didn’t believe that criticism was unfair,” said Palazchenko. “He liked to say that history was a fickle lady and you never knew which way it would turn,” said Pavel Palazchenko, a former interpreter who worked with Gorbachev for decades and is now the head of his press office. Photograph: Evgenia Novozhenina/AFP/Getty Images The memorial service for Gorbachev in the Pillar Hall. He was a famously divisive figure among Russians: Pizza Hut even filmed an advertisement in 1997 featuring a family quarrelling over his legacy. The next 30 years launched a battle over his legacy, one that saw his relationship cool with Putin, who has set a course to reverse many of the reforms Gorbachev initiated in the late 1980s. He was the enemy.”Ī diehard communist who saw the failings of the Soviet system, Gorbachev lost control of his reforms and watched the USSR he sought to save collapse. ![]() ![]() Because while he was alive, he was dangerous. “He was a great man, so immediately after his death people say good words about him,” said Gubarev. And he didn’t have enough time.”įor many, coming to the hall was both an act of appreciation and one of defiance to honour the memory of a leader who brought new freedoms and hastened the collapse of his own country. The way of Gorbachev was the slow way to freedom, to real freedom. “He did a lot, but people now in our country hate him,” Vladimir Gubarev, a retired journalist who lined up on Saturday morning, bearing a few carnations, told the Observer.
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