Five people among those queueing up for Gorbachev’s funeral ceremony detained in Moscow

Moscow police detained five people who were among those queueing up for Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral ceremony at the House of the Unions, OVD-Info, a human rights group that monitors political arrests, reports.

Police officers heard someone criticising the law enforcement in the queue and began looking for the one who made those statements. An unnamed officer asked to see the ID of one of the women queueing up for the ceremony. She gave him her pension certificate. When she asked the officer to give her document back, she was detained.

The officer “saw an elderly woman with a ‘No to war’ pin nearby and ordered his colleague to detain her as well”. Another woman wearing the same pin was detained later.

“You were brave enough to shout those things, and now you’re afraid of saying a word to us? We’ll take the grandma, and you need to fess up who shouted it,” the officer addressed those standing in the queue.

A man asked the police officers not to detain the elderly woman. In response, the officer ordered to take this man to the police station with the rest of the detainees, a sister of one of the women taken into custody told OVD-Info.

Everyone has been released by now. Police filed administrative charges for ‘discrediting’ the Russian army against the women with anti-war pins.

Polina Baranova was also detained in the queue for her “No to war” pin.

A funeral ceremony for Mikhail Gorbachev, the first president of the USSR, was held at the Moscow House of Unions today. The last Soviet leader passed away on 30 August at the age of 91. Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Editor-in-Chief of Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov, Russian Deputy Security Council Secretary Dmitry Medvedev, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, US Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, TV hosts Dmitry Kiselev and Vladimir Pozner, and many others were in attendance at the ceremony.

Gorbachev was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery beside his late wife Raisa.