“He gave us our freedom for a while.” A report from the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev
“He gave us our freedom for a while.” A report from the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev
The farewell ceremony for the first president of the USSR turned out like an act of protest. Many young people were in attendance, but the powers that be stayed away.
Many thanks to my dear friend Chris Booth for his help in translating and editing this article.
On Saturday morning, people leaving metro station ‘Teatralnaya’ were immediately greeted by barriers and riot police. But nobody was planning a demonstration. It was just to cordon off the route to the House of Unions where today last respects were paid to the first president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Although the organisers had promised open entry, nobody was allowed through the main entrance – it had been reserved for VIPs. As was learned later, agents from the Federal Protection Service had been ordered to oversee the service - ‘with elements of a state funeral’ - shortly before it started.
Ordinary people who had come to pay their respects were sent around the corner via Kopyev Lane, but it was also closed off. Just after nine, hundreds of people were already waiting at the barriers. Many had flowers – roses, carnations, daisies. In the queue were many over the age of 50, the very elderly and young people, aged from 18 to 25, some with their parents. You could hear a lot of German spoken, too.
Soon they began to let people through the furthest barrier, but there were more hindrances ahead. Around ten o’clock, the riot police started noisily moving them back and letting the first group of people through a side entrance. The surrealism of the scene was amplified by a large banner that seemed to have been hung on purpose on the Russian Academic Youth Theatre across the road. It read ‘We will complete the task!’, using the letters ‘Z’ and ‘V’ that have characterised Russian propaganda in the war in Ukraine.
In the entrance hall was a portrait of Gorbachev in a black frame and an honour guard. The ceremony was on the second floor: the coffin lay behind velvet curtains and series of wreaths, mostly from political parties, but also from the youth theatre, the Kyrgyz Republic and the family of billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev. The face of the departed was barely visible but for his waxy chin. To the sides, and shielded behind a partition, were several rows of chairs for family and friends. Soldiers and secret policemen kept watch in the hall.
The paying of respects by mere mortals was organised this way: to the sounds of Mozart’s Requiem, occasionally swapped for a Chopin nocturne, they were expected virtually at a trot to move along the long dark border separating them from the coffin by almost three metres, leave their flowers on it, and get back immediately. Two hours were put aside for this hurried procedure, as if they wanted to end and forget the whole thing as quickly as possible.
“Citizens, keep moving” repeated the metallic voice of security to those who had come to accompany Gorbachev on his final journey.
Exiting the building was also only possible through organised corridors. A new crowd of people was coming from the direction of Kuznetsky Bridge. They were also broken into groups, in the way that law enforcement agents would divide demonstrators into smaller units at opposition meetings, when such things still took place in Russian towns.
A vertical of obliviousness
Early on Saturday morning, prior to the official commencement of the event, another former president came to bid farewell to Gorbachev: the deputy head of the Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, who since the start of the war has entirely forgotten his once-democratic views. Neither the current president Vladimir Putin, nor the prime minister Mikhail Mishustin (nor the third or fourth persons of the state – speakers of Russian parliament) came to the funeral. Instead, they sent funeral wreaths.
Putin chose a particular way of paying his respects to one of the authors, in his words, of ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’ – by coming to the mourning hall at the Central Kremlin Hospital. The reason was that his diary was very busy.
The absurdity of the excuse was revealed when on Saturday the Kremlin press service informed of only two telephone calls on Putin’s agenda.
The signal from Putin was transmitted down through the whole ‘vertical of power’: other than Medvedev, virtually nobody among high-ranking official came to the ceremony. Those who were seen there included the general director of Roskosmos, Yuri Borisov, the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov, senator Ludmila Narusova, the chairman of Moscow City Duma, Aleksei Shaposhnikov, business ombudsman Boris Titov, and the tele-propagandist, Dmitri Kiselev.
Such a modest delegation contrasted sharply with the funeral in April of Liberal-Democratic Party leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had never held the post of president, nor any other kind of high-ranking position, yet merited attention from the entire political elite, along with a service at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. And there was absolutely no comparison in Gorbachev’s case with the ceremonials around the wake for Boris Yeltsin.
Meanwhile, pop star Alla Pugacheva came to the funeral. Gorbachev had awarded her the title of People’s Artist of the USSR in 1991. For the past six months she has been ‘hosed down’ in every pro-Kremlin TV channel and website for her anti-war stance, and that of her husband Maksim Galkin.
Through the general public entrance came Alexander Asmolov, Head of the Department of Personality Psychology at Moscow State University. Until March this year he had been a member of the Council on Human Rights, but quit because of ‘inconsistencies in what is happening around human rights’. Shortly before that, he had signed a letter by members of the council calling for ‘the cessation of military action on the territory of Ukraine’.
Asmolov had worked with Gorbachev from 1988, in other words from the start of perestroika, when the Soviet leader gathered the so-called ‘group of professors’ into government, from Moscow State University and others across the country.
“In those days, I knew what glasnost was” he said. “On the Thursday, prime minister Valentin Pavlov sacked Gennady Yagodin, the education minister. On the Friday, journalists Anatoly Lysenko and Sasha Politkovsky broadcast a tv programme about what Yagodin had achieved in his post. By Saturday, Gorbachev had restored him to his ministerial seat.”
In the general queue was Igor Chubais, a sociologist and the brother of Anatoly Chubais. He didn’t figure in the VIP guest lists.
“My Gorbachev story goes back to February 1990 when 300,000 people gathered on Manezh Square and I was the second to address the crowd. I said there are so many of us here today, we could take anything by storm. Sadly I didn’t call for the storming of the KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka. But on the next day, Gorbachev on television said that extremists had gathered on Manezh Square who were calling for the storming of the Kremlin. After that I wasn’t asked to speak again. But I believe that Gorbachev is not forgotten and remains valued in society.”
Among the crowd, Leonid Gurevich waited his turn to pay his respects. He is a former member of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, and former co-chair of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, which came about through the unification of two other parties, one of which was led by Gorbachev. In 2007, the Supreme Court liquidated it following a petition by the Federal Registration Service: the party did not have the required number of regional offices.
“We could of course have fought the decision” he says. “The Republican party fought theirs in the European court, and they won. But in the end of course they were crushed… I insisted, I said ‘Mikhail Sergeievich, the republicans were reinstated, and you’re closer to Europe and more likely to be heard. Why not go to court?’ But he didn’t want to argue with Putin. He said he had weighed it all up, what was good and what was bad about him…”
“It’s not every day that they bury a Russian leader”
Towards midday, by which time the plan had been to end the civil funeral, it became clear that too many people had come to pay their respects to the first president of the USSR. They decided to prolong the event by another two hours. The leader of the Yabloko party, Grigory Yavlinsky, and the editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitri Muratov, laid flowers and stood alongside the relatives. Among others to attend were Channel One tv presenter Vladimir Pozner, former Ekho Moskvy presenter Svetlana Sorokina, the chair of the board of Alfa-Bank Oleg Sysuev, former economics minister Andrei Nechayev, and the businessmen Mikhail Kusnirovich and Alexander Lebedev.
Around 12 o’clock, the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, unexpectedly appeared at the House of Unions. Because of Russia's war with Ukraine he was the only European leader to come to Moscow for Gorbachev’s funeral. Entrance to everyone else was blocked off while he was in the Columned Hall. Having stood at the coffin, the Hungarian leader approached the relatives, spoke with them briefly, and immediately left. He had no plans to meet Putin. The ceremony was also attended by the ambassadors of the USA, Britain, France and other countries.
The queue from the side of Bolshaya Dmitrovka and Kopyev Lane wasn’t getting any shorter, and in it were still many young people. Why had they come? One couple said they wanted to show their respect for “a man who had been covered in dirt and whose service to the country was being denigrated.”
A girl in a colourful scarf said “I came to say farewell to a person who gave us our freedom for a while”. Many said they came because it was a ‘historic event’ and they wanted to feel themselves part of something bigger.
Someone even came because they’d read an article that said Gorbachev was an artist and friendly with Moscow conceptualists.
A girl with red hair giggled “It’s not every day that they bury a Russian leader”.
Around one o’clock, the riot police began to tell the crowd via megaphones that the funeral was over and ‘there’d be no further access’. But a few still get through: ‘You brought a bouquet? Ok, carry on.”
A woman in a raincoat loudly complained that she hadn’t been allowed into the funeral, before slowly changing to more general slogans: “I graduated from the economics faculty of Moscow State University, and we believed in perestroika. We were the ones who raised to the top this criminal gang, and now we have to put up with what they’re doing. Freedom to Aleksei Navalny! [the jailed anti-corruption opposition figure].” Immediately, cameras gathered around her but the riot police didn’t pay her any attention. According to the OVD-Info activist group, however, police detained five people in the queue for the funeral.
At the exit of the House of Unions, foreign TV correspondents were interviewing people, asking why they had come, and what they thought of Gorbachev. “It was an unexpected time, when many things were revealed to us, and we were able to talk them through” a thin woman in a jacket hurriedly said.
In Reuters’ live broadcast of the funeral, there was this exchange: “They might at least have lowered the flags. He was a president! Of the USSR! Oh, man. At least above the Duma they could have lowered them,” one outraged woman said. She had already made it to the ceremony.
“We weren’t ready. They gave us freedom but we didn’t know what to do with it. And then came gangsterism,” answered her neighbour in the crowd.
“The young reformers have flushed down everything to the toilet when they hadn't disbanded the KGB, or state television. Everything’s the same, the same institutions, and that’s what we’re left with,” the first woman responded with sadness.
People with flowers continued to arrive, but at two o’clock security finally prevented access to the hall. Those who hadn’t made it left their flowers at the metro station entrance. At 15.30 the coffin with Gorbachev’s body, draped in a Russian tricolour, was carried out of the House of Unions to be driven to Novodevichy Cemetery. The crowds behind the barriers met it with applause and cries of ‘thank you’.
This could be said of the USA today: “We weren’t ready. They gave us freedom but we didn’t know what to do with it. And then came gangsterism...”