Putin stays away, but many farewell Gorbachev
Thousands of Muscovites queued for hours yesterday to file past the open coffin of Mikhail Gorbachev before the last leader of the Soviet Union was laid to rest beside his beloved wife, Raisa – the soulmate and political confidante he once described as his ‘‘princess’’.
The viewing ceremony took place in the House of the Unions, an opulent 18th-century mansion near the Kremlin, where nobles danced in Tsarist times and previous Soviet leaders lay in state. So many people turned up that the viewing was extended to twice its planned two hours.
The presence of such a large number of mourners seemed not just a tribute to Gorbachev himself, who died on Tuesday, aged 91, but also a mark of defiance towards Vladimir Putin, the current incumbent of the Kremlin, who has done so much to overturn his predecessor’s legacy and, in a clear snub, stayed away from the proceedings. Among them was Grigory Yavlinsky, 70, the leader of Yabloko, a now tiny liberal opposition party, whose political career began under Gorbachev. ‘‘I came here to show gratitude for the chance,’’ he said. ‘‘No one even asked him for it, he just gave people the opportunity to say what they think. This never happened in Russia before.’’
It was nevertheless a remarkably low-key farewell for one of the most influential figures of the late 20th century. Gorbachev was denied a state funeral – in contrast to Boris Yeltsin, his successor who paved the way for Putin’s entry into the Kremlin and was rewarded in 2007 with a televised farewell ceremony at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
Since Gorbachev’s death, western leaders have been effusive in their praise of his legacy - but the only one present was Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who first made his name protesting against the Soviet presence in his country in 1989. Many of the others, including Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, have long since been barred from entering Russia. The British and American ambassadors both attended.
Putin, who disdained his predecessor for allowing the Soviet Union to fall apart, laid flowers beside Gorbachev’s coffin during a visit earlier in the week. His spokesman attributed his absence from yesterday’s events to work commitments.
Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s former prime minister, meanwhile, used the occasion to accuse the West of plotting the breakup of Russia itself, warning ‘‘a forceful disintegration of a nuclear power is always a chess game with death’’.
The choice of Novodevichy, Russia’s highest-profile cemetery, as the last resting place of the former Soviet president reflected his closeness to Raisa, who is buried there. The pair will lie beneath a life-size statue of her. They met as students in Moscow in the early 1950s when Stalin still ruled the Soviet Union and soon became inseparable. He was distraught when she died in 1999, aged 67, and never remarried.
‘‘We walked through our whole life holding hands,’’ Gorbachev said in a 2012 documentary. ‘‘She had something magnificent about her . . . she was like a princess.’’
Intelligent and glamorous, Raisa had already become a highly visible presence at Gorbachev’s side – perhaps too visible for many Russians, unused to the idea of a ‘‘first lady’’.
Much of the Soviet system still remained unchanged from the ‘‘era of stagnation’’ that prevailed under Gorbachev’s predecessors.
Gorbachev had been put in power by the old men in the politburo in the hope he would breathe new life into this system. That too, had been the initial intention of Gorbachev himself, the son of peasants and a convinced Leninist who had steadily worked his way up the ranks of the Communist Party.
But when he began to introduce reforms he came to realise how unfit for purpose the Soviet Union’s political and economic structure had become. As he famously declared: ‘‘We cannot go on living this way.’’
By 1988, he and Ronald Reagan were well on the way to ending the Cold War, slashing their countries’ nuclear arsenals and paving the way for the liberation of Moscow’s central European satellites under what became dubbed the ‘‘Sinatra doctrine’’ (countries were allowed to do it ‘‘their way’’). The result was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
Yet the seeds of Gorbachev’s own political destruction - and those of the vast country over which he presided - had been sown. The intelligentsia were thrilled by his willingness to talk openly of the crimes perpetrated under his predecessors and to allow the publication for the first time of books from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which hitherto they had been able to read only in clandestine samizdat editions.
Dissidents were released and some even went into politics opposing Gorbachev.