The former Soviet leader Mr Mikhail Gorbachev arrived home in Moscow yesterday with the body of his wife, Raisa, who died in a German hospital a day earlier of leukaemia aged 67.
"We left here more than two months ago with big hopes . . . such hope was still with us even two or four days ago. Now all has gone," Mr Gorbachev whispered to journalists with tears welling in red-rimmed eyes at the airport.
"It was a terrible illness. The doctors did everything in their power and even the best medication could not help. I am worried all the time by one thought - did I do all I could?" Mr Gorbachev said, surrounded by his daughter's family and other well-wishers.
"She now feels no pain," said Mr Gorbachev, whose only daughter Irina held his arm. A black-windowed hearse stood behind the jet provided by the Russian government.
"The first feeling is of grief, great and irreplaceable," Mr Gorbachev told NTV television from Munster. "It is difficult. Right now I am overcome with emotion," he added. "But I will have to gather my strength. I still have strength left in me. I have a daughter, grandchildren, and we will live."
In the Russian press, Mrs Gorbachev's death has prompted an outpouring of affection for a woman who had been banished from the media for several years and who was treated with scant respect when her husband was in power. Most newspapers went out of their way to find the warmest words they could about the couple.
"She is gone. A woman who, by just being a woman and a wife, changed the world. Our Soviet, grey, reinforced-concrete world," said the liberal daily Izvestia in an article covering the whole of its front page under a banner headline "The Last Autumn".
Almost all stories were filled with a gentle feeling of nostalgia for a time when she managed to crack open the edifice of the rigid Soviet system by simply appearing, fashionable and elegant, by her husband's side.
"The debut of the wife of the Soviet president had no lesser impact on Russia than the fall of the Berlin Wall on the West," the mass-circulation Moskovsky Komsomolets said.
"Raisa Gorbachev turned out to be the first and so far the last lady in our country," the business daily Kommersant said.
Papers hailed her courage to break with the tradition that women only counted when they did manly things for the state.
"In the post-monarchist 20th century Raisa Gorbachev accepted the burden of a trailblazer - for the first time the spouse of the head of state came out of the shadow to play a dignified role in public and political life," the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta said.
Mrs Gorbachev's funeral takes place tomorrow.