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Funeral of last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to take place on Saturday
The funeral of the Soviet Union's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday (August 30) in Moscow aged 91, will take place on Saturday (September 3), Russian news agencies reported, citing Gorbachev's daughter and a spokesperson for his foundation.
According to Reuters, the funeral will take place in the famous Hall of Columns inside Moscow's House of Unions, Russian news agencies reported, the same place where Josef Stalin's body was put on display following his death in 1953.
The service will be open to the public and Gorbachev will then be buried at Moscow's central Novodevichy Cemetery, the TASS news agency cited Vladimir Polyakov, press secretary for the Gorbachev Foundation, as saying.
The TASS news agency reported Peskov as saying that the Kremlin would announce later whether President Vladimir Putin would attend Gorbachev's funeral.
It is said it took President Putin more than 15 hours to publish the text of a restrained condolence message in which he said Gorbachev had had a “huge impact on the course of world history” and “deeply understood that reforms were necessary” to tackle the problems of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Putin earlier on Wednesday (August 31) sent Gorbachev's relatives his condolences via telegram, while the Kremlin hailed the late politician as an extraordinary global statesman who helped end the Cold War, but had been badly wrong about the prospect of rapprochement with the "bloodthirsty" West.
During the Soviet Union, burial in the Novodevichy Cemetery was second in prestige only to burial in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
It took Putin 15 hours to publish a restrained condolence message on Gorbachev
Among the Soviet leaders, only Nikita Khrushchev was buried at the Novodevichy rather than at Red Square, however, Mikhail Gorbachev will be buried there according to his will.
Dozens of high-ranking politicians, poets, royals and intellectuals have been buried at the cemetery since it was established in the 16th century - among them Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president and Gorbachev's political rival.
It is also the resting place of Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, who died in 1999.
Last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who is awarded Nobel Peace Prize, dies at age of 91
Novodevichy Cemetery lies next to the southern wall of the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin Wall is no longer used for burials and the Novodevichy Cemetery is used for only the most symbolically significant burials.
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