AUGUST 31, 2022 UPDATE:
MOSCOW (AP) — The funeral and burial plans for Mikhail Gorbachev will sum up the crosscurrents of his legacy. Final farewells to the former Soviet leader are to be said in the same place where his rigid Soviet predecessors also lay. But he will be buried near men who broke the Soviet mold. Gorbachev, who died Tuesday (Aug. 30, 2022), is to lie in state on Saturday in Moscow’s House of Unions. The building between the Bolshoi Theater and the Duma, the lower house of parliament, for decades held the bodies of deceased Soviet leaders including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. But Gorbachev is to be buried in the cemetery of Novodevichy Convent, the resting place for the ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and for Boris Yeltsin.
AUGUST 31, 2022:
BERLIN (AP) — The passing of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and for many the man who restored democracy to many European countries under communist rule, was mourned for the loss of what world leaders described as a rare leader who brought global change and at the time a hope for peace among the superpowers. But the man who died in Moscow on Tuesday (Aug. 30, 2022) at the age of 91, was also reviled by many in his own country who blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union and its diminution as a superpower. The loss of pride and power also led to the eventual rise of Vladimir Putin, who has spent the past quarter-century trying to restore Russia to its former glory and beyond.
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