Hundreds of mourners pay tribute in Russian capital to former Soviet leader credited with helping to end cold war
Hundreds of mourners are lining up in central Moscow to bid farewell to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, often credited with bringing an end to the cold war.
The farewell ceremony, which is being held in the Hall of Pillars in Moscow’s House of the Unions, will be followed by a closed funeral in the Novodevichy cemetery.
Continue reading...Russian president lays wreath at hospital where Soviet leader died but will snub funeral
Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has said, in what will be seen as an extraordinary snub by the Russian president.
Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at 91, will also not receive an official state funeral, a Kremlin spokesperson indicated, making him the first leader since Nikita Khrushchev not to be given that honour.
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The former farm worker with the rolling south Russian accent and distinctive port-wine birthmark on his head gave notice of his bold ambition soon after winning a Kremlin power struggle in 1985, at the age of 54, Reuters reports.
Television broadcasts showed him besieged by workers in factories and farms, allowing them to vent their frustrations with Soviet life and making the case for radical change.
Continue reading...Despite being celebrated across liberal democracies, the former Soviet leader was reviled and unpopular in Russia
Until his very last day, Mikhail Gorbachev lived in a dual reality – loved and celebrated in Washington, Paris and London, but reviled by large numbers of Russians who never forgave him for the turbulence that his reforms unleashed.
His policy of ‘glasnost’, or openness, gave Russians previously unthinkable levels of freedom, but for many, his rule will be remembered by the dramatic plunge in living standards that followed.
Continue reading...The idea that the Soviet Union was tricked in 1989-90 is at the heart of Russia’s confrontation with the west
The current confrontation between Russia and the west is fuelled by many grievances, but the greatest is the belief in Moscow that the west tricked the former Soviet Union by breaking promises made at the end of the cold war in 1989-1990 that Nato would not expand to the east. In his now famous 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin accused the west of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruins.
Continue reading...Many politicians and diplomats from the 1980s lay claim to a pivotal role in ending the cold war, but the former US secretary of state George Shultz, who has died aged 100, had a better claim than most. And he was not shy in letting people know, as he did at length in his 1,184-page account of his years at the state department, Turmoil and Triumph (1993).
When he became secretary of state in 1982 – a job he was to hold for seven years – relations between the US and the Soviet Union were at a dangerous low. The administration of US president Ronald Reagan was packed with anti-Soviet hardliners. Reagan himself in 1983 dubbed the Soviet Union “the evil empire”.
Continue reading...Reunification has only fed resentment and alienation among the ‘losers’ of the old East Germany
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
The night the Berlin Wall opened was like that. Thirty years on, I know people who were there and whose eyes fill with tears when they try to talk about it. Seamus Heaney understood how the “moment of rhyme”, when the right thing suddenly and unexpectedly and enormously happens, can last for a lifetime. The unrepeatable shock of recognition.
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