MUENSTER, Germany -- Grief-stricken former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Tuesday flew home to Russia with the body of his wife, Raisa, who died in a German hospital on Monday of leukemia at age 67.
"I'm feeling great sorrow," Gorbachev, tears welling in reddened eyes, told journalists as he left his hotel in the west German town of Muenster for the nearby airport."The doctors did everything in their powers, but it was a terrible illness," said Gorbachev, who was at his wife's side when she died in the early hours Monday morning after weeks of treatment by German specialists against the blood cancer.
Gorbachev's plane, a jet provided by the Russian government, took off shortly before midday.
Raisa, who brought glamor and controversy to the Kremlin when her husband ruled the former Soviet Union, is due to be buried Thursday in Moscow's exclusive Novodevichy cemetery.
Holding the hand of his only daughter, Irina, who was dressed in black, Gorbachev did not seek to hide his grief at his wife's death from a rare and acute form of the disease.
"Now our task is to hold ourselves together, but that is not so easy, you understand," he said. "Everything I could have done, we did."
Accompanied by a small German police escort and the Russian ambassador, Gorbachev showed his trademark politeness, saying affectionate goodbyes to staff.
Tributes have poured in from across the world, including one from U.S. President Bill Clinton, who spoke of Raisa's "courageous struggle against this terrible disease" and her work to help child victims of leukaemia.
But perhaps the most poignant was from former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl--Gorbachev's opposite number during his turbulent six-year rule leading to German unification and the Soviet Union's collapse.
"I experienced again in my recent conversations with Mikhail Gorbachev how much Raisa influenced her husband and his life, and how they both belonged together," Kohl wrote in a newspaper article which appeared on Tuesday.
"They were really a pair which--as he himself said--took a path together for life."
Raisa Gorbachev will be remembered not just for the chic fashions that so shocked the conservative Soviet public and charmed the West when her husband took power in 1985 but for the way she embodied the new age his policies ushered in.
If the relatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (reconstruction) reforms were all about Communist Party debate and tractor production, Raisa's bold break with the tradition of the unseen Kremlin wife and her Western tastes did much to capture the mood for the masses.