It was to the nunnery at Novodevichi in southern Moscow that Peter the Great sent his wife, Evdokia Lopukhina, when he tired of her. Since then the convent and its adjoining graveyard have witnessed the arrival, on their last journey, of thousands of famous Russians. Chekhov, Gogol and Borodin were laid to rest there and, in later years, Nikita Khrushchev.
The burial at Novodevichi of Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev could hardly be in starker contrast to the arrival there three centuries ago of Evdokia Lopukhina. If there was one woman in Russian history since Catherine the Great who broke through from the male dominance of political society it was Raisa Gorbachev. She did so with style and panache.
The Soviet Union in which Mrs Gorbachev was raised gave the world to believe that equality of the sexes had been achieved through communism. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space and there were token women in apparently important positions in many of the professions.
It was against this background that the young Raisa Titarenko was brought up in a small Siberian town. It was against this background, too, that she broke loose from convention after her marriage to Mikhail Gorbachev whom she met when a student in Moscow State University.
Mr Gorbachev yesterday walked behind his wife's coffin at Novodevichi in a scene which was precisely the opposite of those seen so many times in the Soviet area. In the old days the only time the wife of the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was given the limelight was when she walked behind her husband's coffin at the state funeral.
Raisa Gorbachev was not cut out for that sort of thing. Wives of other Soviet leaders were dowdy and retiring. She was stylish and extrovert and she was not afraid to say things which ran counter to the party line. Asked in London whether she wished to travel to Highgate to see the grave of Marx, she replied: "I'd rather see Marks and Spencer."
Though Mrs Gorbachev possessed style and flair in abundance, her contribution to Russian history was of a far more serious nature. As president, Mr Gorbachev publicly acknowledged his wife's influence, much to the annoyance of the party's old guard.
On the domestic scene she directly inspired legislation on healthcare for women and children and, ironically, she worked hard for children with leukaemia, the disease which finally took her life.
Her influence on the policies of glasnost and perestroika was undoubted, and the presence of Dr Helmut Kohl at her funeral yesterday was a witness to her role and influence in ending the Cold War and hastening German reunification. She was Russia's most important woman of the century.