Russia fired this Saturday the last president of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91 after a long illness. Since early in the morning, hundreds of citizens have lined up to say their last goodbye to one of the most relevant political leaders of the 20th century.
The ceremony to bid farewell to the father of perestroika is held this morning in the Hall of Columns of the Moscow House of Trade Unions, and in the afternoon he will be buried in the Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife, Raisa Gorbachev, who died of a leukemia in 1999.
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev has aroused conflicting opinions in Russia about his figure and historical role.
The Russian government has decided not to hold a state funeral and President Putin will not attend either, officially "due to work agenda".
Despite Gorbachev's historical importance, he is a highly controversial figure in Russia as perestroika (the transition from the communist system to the market economy) and glasnost (the transparency of institutions state) as a great failure and blame it for having ruined the project of the USSR at the end of the Cold War with the disintegration of the Soviet republics. Instead, in much of the rest of the world, he is seen as the man who brought down the 'iron curtain' and modernized Russia.
