A few thousand Russians fired the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, on Saturday during a funeral without official fuss, especially marked by the absence of President Vladimir Putin.

Many Russians present

Russians entered the House of Trade Unions, a Moscow landmark, in small groups to lay roses and bow silently to Gorbachev’s open coffin, near which stood a portrait of the former leader.

“A great politician is leaving, today the era of Gorbachev ends,” says a 44-year-old miller. “He calmed down relations with America (…) Everybody knew him,” he adds.

A long line of people had formed in the morning to pay tribute to Gorbachev, a great political figure of the 20th century who died Tuesday night at the age of 91.

He made history by precipitating, despite himself, the demise of the Soviet empire in 1991, while trying to save it with democratic and economic reforms, thus ending the Cold War.

Between symbol of openness and degradation of Russia

In a context of increasing repression and withdrawal amid Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine, some Russians present at the funeral remember with nostalgia the opening under Gorbachev.

“We had a breath of freedom, it gave us transparency and pluralism,” said Natalia Leleko, a 60-year-old teacher.

It was “an air of freedom that had been missing for a long time, the absence of fear”, abounds Ksenia Joupanova, a 41-year-old interpreter. “I am against the fact of isolating oneself from the rest of the world, I am in favor of openness, of dialogue.”

Hailed by the West and some Russians as a man of peace, Gorbachev is also seen by many at home as responsible for the geopolitical degradation of Moscow and the years of crisis that followed the fall of the USSR.

a sober funeral

A sign of discomfort in the face of this ambivalent heritage, no day of national mourning has been announced. Above all, the funeral was held in the absence of Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin presented a busy “program”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is close to the Kremlin, is the only foreign leader to have visited Moscow, where he bowed to Gorbachev’s remains.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered his condolences in a phone call with Vladimir Putin on Saturday, the Kremlin said.

Ambassadors from several Western countries, as well as former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and journalist Dmitry Muratov, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, attended the funeral to offer their condolences to Gorbachev’s daughter Irina.

After this ceremony, Gorbachev is to be buried in the Novodevichy cemetery, along with his wife Raisa Gorbacheva, who died in 1999 and to whom he was very close.

Putin absent

If he did not attend the funeral this Saturday, Vladimir Putin would have discreetly gone on Thursday to the Central Clinical Hospital (TSKB) in Moscow, where Gorbachev died, to lay a bouquet of red roses.

In his message of condolence, Vladimir Putin paid a sober tribute to Gorbachev, noting that he had had “a great influence on world history” and that he had “sought to find his own solutions to the problems” of the USSR.

Instead, Western capitals, from Washington to Berlin to Paris, warmly celebrated the memory of Gorbachev, acclaimed for having worked for East-West rapprochement and the reduction of nuclear arsenals, which in 1990 earned him the Nobel Prize for peace.

Germany at half mast

Germany, whose reunification was made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall, announced that flags would be lowered to half-staff in the German capital on Saturday.

But in Russia, Gorbachev is seen by many as the gravedigger of the great Soviet power that rivaled the United States and whose end, considered humiliating, ushered in a decade of crisis and violence.

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president in power during the years of the painful transition to a market economy, and who had appointed Vladimir Putin as his successor, received high honors at his death in 2007.

The Kremlin then declared a day of national mourning and organized an official funeral. In the presence of Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev.