Mr Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday aged 91, is set to be buried without state honours or Russian President Vladimir Putin in attendance.
abc.net.au/news/russia-mikhail-gorbachev-funeral-without-putin-state-honours/101403628Muscovites are lining up near the Kremlin to pay their respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who was widely admired in the West for his reforms but lived long enough to see Russia's leadership roll back much of that change.
Mr Gorbachev became a hero to many in the West for allowing eastern Europe to shake off more than four decades of Soviet communist control. For that, and the economic chaos that his "perestroika" liberalisation program unleashed, many Russians could not forgive him.The many Western heads of state who would certainly have come will be absent on Saturday, kept away by the chasm in relations between Moscow and the West opened up by Mr Putin's move to send troops into Ukraine in February.
It will all be a far cry from the national day of mourning and state funeral in Moscow's principal cathedral that was granted in 2007 to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who was instrumental in sidelining Mr Gorbachev as the Soviet Union fell apart and later hand-picked Mr Putin as his own successor.
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