MOSCA – We lined up too, with family and friends, with the grandmother with the handkerchief on his head and the little boy with a red carnation in his hand, and we too threw our handful of damp earth on the pale wooden coffin swallowed by the darkness of the freshly dug pit. Mikhail Gorbachev he would not have wanted to rest anywhere but here. In the cemetery of the Novodevichij monastery, next to his wife Rajssa, the “woman he loved more than power” and who had been crying for 23 years.
When they lowered it into the niche on the notes of the Ballad of the soldier by Vasilij Soloviov-Sedoj, the afternoon suddenly clouded over and a light drizzle fell for just a few minutes, as if not even the sky could hold back the tears. Gorbachev’s was not just the funeral of a man who wanted to change his country and ended up changing the world, who was at the head of an empire and gave up on it. It was the funeral of a Russia that for too long has felt an orphan of freedom and hope, but that at least for a day made an appointment in silence.
Gorbachev died. The last Secretary General, the first Reformer
by Ezio Mauro
The Russians lined up: “Here good people”
There was no state honors or national mourning for the farewell to the last Soviet leader. And there were no words. Just a procession of Russians composed with flowers in their hands. They lined up on the side of the Bolshoi Theater early in the morning, while the traffic on the first Saturday of September passed sleepily. At first a few hundred, then a few thousand. Not an oceanic crowd, but a multitude that hadn’t been seen in Moscow for some time.
Evgenija Ganijeva, 40, wished there was even more. “But it is comforting to be among good people for a day without risking prison. Many of us do not support what is happening in Ukraine. I was ten when the USSR ended. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demolition of the Felix Dzerzhinskij monument. Those events made me the person I am today. “
Aleksei is more or less the same age, 36 years old, yet he remembers – like so many Russians who have snubbed the greeting – “the shortage of products, the stagnation and the queues to buy food”, but also recalls “the transformations, the hopes and the openness to the world that no longer exists “and he is moved.
Vladimir Janitsky, 68 years old, before the advent of Gorbachev – he says – was forced to write “for the drawer”: “Power snubbed us. Mikhail Sergeevic instead made us feel citizens. He respected us. And I was able to start. to write for various literary magazines “.
Elena Ponomariova, 54, wears the colors of the yellow-blue Ukrainian flag: “No, that’s no coincidence. We live in cloudy times, it’s true, but we’re here to greet our political sun of the twentieth century”.
In line at Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow: “Gorbachev destroyed the USSR, the conflict with Kiev is his fault”
by our correspondent Rosalba Castelletti
Barriere, metal detector, “Z” e “V”
Yevgeny, Alexei, Vladimir and Elena are the ones who Vladimir Putin calls “traitors”. To pay homage to the Nobel Peace Prize winner who averted a nuclear war, they parade under a tarp covering a facade under renovation where it is written in large letters Zadachu Vypolnim, “We will complete our mission”, with the “Z” and “V” in Latin characters symbolizing the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine. They overcome the barriers and metal detectors that separate them from the remains of the man who in life broke down the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the physical and virtual barriers.
When they finally arrive at the House of Trade Unions, they are greeted by a portrait of Gorbachev in black and white, standing and smiling, reminding him of the cheerful vigor that distinguished him from gray and sick predecessors. Then, having climbed the monumental staircase amidst pastel green stuccoes and mirrors covered by black organza veils, they enter the majestic Sala delle Colonne lit by the dim glow of 54 chandeliers where the last giant of the twentieth century lies flanked by a guard of honor.
The face that looks like wax: what remains of the 20th century giant
A black cloth on the bier, red roses at the foot of the coffin and a stream of white light that makes the wide, relaxed face waxy. It’s the only thing protruding from a white damask satin sheet. The last image that remains of the man who traded power for freedom. On the one hand a portrait and the honors, on the other the daughter Irina and the two granddaughters sitting among the group of closest friends. How Dmitry Muratovthe director of the Nobel Peace Prize for the censored Novaya Gazeta, wrapped in a dark coat, his blue eyes always lowered and the air sad. And the closest collaborators, the spokesperson of the Foundation Vladimir Polyakov and the interpreter of the historical summits with Ronald Reagan Pavel Palazhchenko.
People lay flowers and bow silently, while solemn music plays. In line there is also Sergey Buntmanco-founder of Echo of Moscow, the “perestroika radio” forced to stop broadcasting last March: “Gorbachev changed our lives. We were suffocated. He gave us breath. I hope those times will return”. And Jan Rachinskyhead of the historic NGO Memorial closed after thirty years: “All this saddened him, I’m sure. But his legacy is impossible to erase.”
Andrej Zubov, co-president of the Parnas party is happy to parade with young people who were not born in the 1990s, but regrets that “in ’53 for a dictator like Stalin there were millions of people, for the man who gave us freedom there were there are thousands “. It also comes in a wheelchair Suzanne Massiethe American historian who prepared Reagan for his meetings with Gorbachev and guided him towards a thaw: “I still remember that time Mikhail Sergeevic sang in the White House Midnight in Moscow“.
Russia, flowers on Gorbachev’s coffin. Then Putin goes to Kaliningrad not to be at the funeral
by our correspondent Rosalba Castelletti
State honors denied and Putin’s “commitments”
The hall is the same that hosted the dances of the nobility under the Tsars and the Party Congresses under the USSR. And where all the other general secretaries of the Soviet Union lay for the solemn funerals. For all his predecessors, except for the defenestrated Nikita Khrushchev, there were state funerals and national mourning, solemn speeches and burial in the necropolis in the shadow of the Kremlin walls. Not for Gorbachev.
Vladimir Putin he wanted to demean the leader who, by changing the USSR, accelerated its fall and distanced himself from that controversial legacy: denying honors and his presence. He was held back, according to his spokesman, by too many “commitments”: unspecified business meetings, an international phone call and preparations for the Eastern Economic Forum to be held next week.
Only the former premier and president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy of the Security Council, pays his respects in person. All the other exponents of the nomenklatura, from the premier Mikhail Mishustin down, they just send a crown. And of all the foreign leaders only the Hungarian nationalist premier arrives in Moscow Viktor Orbán. For the United States, Great Britain and Germany there are ambassadors and for Italy the deputy Guido De Sanctis.
The funeral ceremony at the Novodevichij cemetery
Closed the funeral home, greeted by applause and some Thank you, “Thank you”, the coffin is loaded onto the hearse followed by a theory of dark machines. Waiting for her among the boughs strewn avenues of the Novodevichij cemetery and among the graves of literary greats such as Checkov and Gogol, there is another moved crowd. Even more collection. He doesn’t say a word.
The air is filled with incense and the tinkling of the censer as the priest Alexei Uminsky quietly recites the funeral service under a black tent set up, the last nemesis, right in front of the tomb of Boris Yeltsin. Then the coffin is accompanied by guards at a goose pace to the sound of the three farewell shots and the Russian anthem which has the same melody as the Soviet one and lowered into the pit. People get back in line. Slides the dirt into the hole. The place that Gorbachev has chosen for his rest. And that says it all about him.