The Sala del Pilar in the House of Unions is a large old ballroom where Soviet leaders are displayed when they die. Almost a century ago, Vladimir Lenin’s body lay in state for three days before his funeral. Stalin and Brezhnev followed. Now Mikhail Gorbachev is here, pale in a lit coffin: the last Soviet leader is finally laid to rest.
Vladimir Putin is not here, a snub the Kremlin has said was the result of his busy work schedule. Yet thousands of Russians have come to pay their respects, queuing outside downtown theaters and trendy cafes, each remembering that Mikhail Gorbachev remains a hero to some.
“He did a lot of things, but people now in our country hate him,” Vladimir Gubarev, a retired journalist who stood in line Saturday morning, with a few carnations, told the Observer. “People want to be happy quickly. Immediately. Gorbachev’s path was the slow path to freedom, to real freedom. And he didn’t have enough time.”
For many, coming to the hall was both an act of thanks and a challenge to honor the memory of a leader who brought new freedoms and hastened the downfall of his own country. “He was a great man, so immediately after his death people say good things about him,” Gubarev said. “But only after he’s gone. Because while he was alive, he was dangerous. He was the enemy.”
A staunch communist who saw the failures of the Soviet system, Gorbachev lost control of his reforms and watched as the USSR sought to save the collapse. The next 30 years saw a battle over his legacy, one that saw his relationship with Putin cool, setting the course for reversing many of the reforms Gorbachev started in the late 1980s. He was a famously divisive figure among Russians: Pizza Hut even filmed a commercial in 1997 with a family fighting over his legacy.
Gorbachev’s memorial service in Sala del Pilar. Photograph: Evgenia Novozhenina/AFP/Getty Images
“He liked to say that history was a fickle lady and you never knew where it would turn,” said Pavel Palazchenko, a former performer who worked with Gorbachev for decades and is now the head of his press office.
“He did understand that there were quite a few people who blamed him in Russia for the dissolution of the Soviet Union; I didn’t think the criticism was unfair,” Palazchenko said. “It’s the blame game, the slanderous and ignorant accusations, which he rejected. He drew a line.”
Although Putin was absent from the funeral, the Russian state was not. A uniformed military guard stood by a portrait of Gorbachev as mourners entered the House of Trade Unions, and national guardsmen patrolled the halls of the 18th-century mansion.
Silence fell as people filed into the wood-and-marble pillar room, where light operatic music played and the lights dimmed, except for a spotlight on Gorbachev’s coffin. Mourners passed by, some leaving flowers or bowing, others stopping to take a photograph. Family members and some dignitaries, including Nobel laureate journalist Dmitri Muratov, were seated nearby. The mourners walked past a cadre of soldiers dressed in parade uniform, bayonets fixed to their rifles, and returned to the world. The whole process took about two minutes.
There was an undercurrent of tension: This was probably the largest gathering of Russian liberals in the capital since the anti-war protests that erupted after the invasion in late February. There were many in protest, although public dissent has all but disappeared from the country.
“It’s been six months since so many decent people gathered in one place,” said Alexei, an amateur photographer who attended the ceremony. He asked that his last name not be used due to security concerns.
Those close to Gorbachev said he had suffered personal agony over events in Ukraine in the final months of his life, but had been prevented from taking a more public role because of his failing health.
He had already done the main thing required in his life: perestroika Sergei Traub, mourning
“He felt a sharp pain when these things were mentioned. I can tell you that for sure,” Palazchenko said. Gorbachev had personally approved a statement from his foundation calling for “an early cessation of hostilities and the immediate start of peace negotiations,” Palazchenko added.
Still, Gorbachev’s legacy complicates matters. The former Soviet leader told an interviewer in 2016 that he supported Putin’s actions in Crimea and that, with his health declining, his own voice was conspicuously absent as the scale and brutality of the war in Ukraine.
Palazchenko defended his former boss. “I think the people who wrote on their Facebook pages and in the media that Gorbachev is silent… I think that’s unfair.
“They didn’t understand very simple things. And we couldn’t say things about his health that have now become clear enough.”
Outside, war seemed to hang over the funeral. A banner on the new stage of the Bolshoi Theater read: “We will accomplish the mission!” It carried pro-war symbols, such as the patriotic orange and black ribbon of Saint George, as well as the V and Z that have become symbols of the invasion.
Asked how Gorbachev should have responded to the war, Sergei Truba, a pensioner at the ceremony, said: “He had already done the most important thing in his life.” When asked what he meant, he replied: “Perestroika.” Regarding the war, he added, “his voice would not have made any difference. I couldn’t have changed that.”
“I actually didn’t like Gorbachev,” said Truba, who added that he had condemned Gorbachev and Yeltsin as the main culprits in hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union. “But once Putin came, everything changed for me … I realized what a great man we had before.”