JAKARTA - The funeral ceremony for the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, will take place on Saturday, the Russian news agency reported, citing the daughter of Gorbachev and her foundation spokeswoman.
Gorbachev Tuesday at a Moscow hospital at the age of 91. Gorbachev's body will be buried in the Hall ofvistry, which is well-known in Moscow's House of Unions, where Josef Stalin's body was buried after his death in 1953.
It will be open to the public and Gorbachev will then be buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, TASS news agency quoted Vladimir Polyakov, press secretary for the Gorbachev Foundation, as saying.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin would soon decide whether Gorbachev would be given a state funeral. Meanwhile, RIA news agency quoted Pavel Palazchenko, head of media relations at the Gorbachev Foundation, as saying the ceremony at the Hall ofvisins would be organized by President Vladimir Putin's government protocol service.
"There is no information yet whether this is considered a state funeral or not," he told RIA.
Many high-level politicians, intellectuals, poets and nobles have been buried in the cemetery of Novodevichy since the funeral was founded in the 16th century.
Among them is Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president and political rival Gorbachev. It is also the final resting place for Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, who died in 1999. The only Soviet leader besides Gorbachev who was buried there was Nikita Khrushchev. Most of the Soviet leaders were buried near the Kremlin wall on Red Square.
To note, when Yeltsin died in 2007, he was buried with full state honor. President Vladimir Putin, his successor, announced a day of national mourning. TASS reported, Peskov said the Kremlin would announce later whether Putin would attend the funeral.
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