Russian President Dmitry Medvedev plans to attend the ceremony to bid his last farewell to former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Kremlin said Wednesday.
Chernomyrdin died early on Wednesday morning at the age of 72. He will be laid to rest in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery on Friday.
Medvedev said Chernomyrdin was an extremely popular prime minister and a symbol of changes.
"Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin is no more. This is a great loss for our entire country. He was a symbol of the new Russia; together with our new country he made many different decisions, sometimes painful, and served his Motherland his entire life," the Russian leader said in a Kremlin address.
"He was a warm-hearted man of great charm and simplicity, open to all. We will remember him," he said.
After serving as Russian prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin from 1992-1998, Chernomyrdin was appointed Russian ambassador to Ukraine in 2001, a post he held until 2009, when he was designated as a presidential advisor.
Chernomyrdin was a steadfast supporter of Boris Yeltsin and backed privatization and a number of other reforms, although he started his career by opposing many economic changes. His main contribution to politics was acting as a compromise figure between the free market reformers trying to change Russia and the hardline Communists and nationalists who supported the status quo.
He was minister of the oil and gas industries during the late 1980s and helped to turn the ministry into the state-owned gas company Gazprom in 1989. He was the company's first chairman of the board, a post which he retained on-and-off until 2000, and his stake in the company made him one of Russia's richest men.
Chernomyrdin is best known in the Russian-speaking world for his colorful use of language and coined the now popular proverb, which can be translated as "we tried our best, you know the rest," uttered after the Russian Central Bank carried out an unsuccessful monetary exchange in the early 1990s.
MOSCOW, November 3 (RIA Novosti)
