He was the last leader of the Soviet Union, the man who helped end the Cold War, and the president who tried to turn Russia into a functioning democracy.
But when Mikhail Gorbachev's death was announced, his successor Vladimir Putin issued a curiously short and muted statement.
Via a Kremlin spokesman, the Russian leader expressed "his deepest condolences" over Gorbachev's death, and promised to send a telegram to his family.
The reaction within Russia to the passing of one of the nation's most important figures was similarly austere.
But Gorbachev would likely have expected nothing more than a half-hearted farewell.
After once being perhaps the most important man on Earth, Gorbachev spent his final years alone in a mansion in suburban Moscow with only bodyguards and a chef to keep him company.
When Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, he had no greater champion than Mikhail Gorbachev.
Ever the optimist, he believed the young leader would continue his life's work of ushering in democratic reforms in a nation that had evolved from a monarchy to an empire to a communist state.
But as Putin slowly transformed Russia into an imperial presidency, the two men turned against each other.
In Putin's hyper-masculine autocracy, Gorbachev was a soft touch who had sold out to the West for campaigns with Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton.
So fractious was their relationship that by 2007, Gorbachev publicly said he was "ashamed" of Putin and his deputy, Dimitri Medvedev.
"They act in an indecent way. As if there was no society, as there was no constitution, no election system … they believe they are the saviours of the motherland," he said.
As Gorbachev's health declined this year and he was largely tethered to dialysis machines, he watched on in horror as Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.
It was a move he reportedly saw as the final nail in the coffin of his vision for Russia.
"Everything that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev did – it's all ruined," journalist Alexei Venediktov, the editor of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, told the Russian Forbes magazine.
"All the Gorbachev reforms reduced to zero, dust, smoke."
Gorbachev's legacy is a source of bitterness for Putin
Born amid the violent upheavals of the October Revolution in 1917, the Soviet Union's seven decades were marked by achievement, the butchering of millions, and then a slow decline.
By the 1980s, years of scientific and military advancement had given way to social and economic stagnation.
Debate over its causes vary, with theories ranging from flaws in the union's command structure to a lack of crucial reforms and exorbitant military spending.
Whatever the reason, after the short-lived regimes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was of the view the socialist system was in a mess and needed to be fixed.
When the youngest leader since Joseph Stalin rose to power in 1985, he swiftly put together a plan of "glasnost," or openness. It was a breath of fresh air to a rotting empire.
"Gorbachev was still a man of the Communist Party, but he saw that there were deficiencies in the system, the kind of scleroticism of the system that needed to be dealt with," says Gorana Grgic, an expert in the Soviet Union's collapse from the University of Sydney's US Studies Centre.
The series of reforms electrified the country, challenging the iron fist of Soviet propaganda by opening the bloc up to dissenting voices and social transformation.
These changes were also accompanied by perestroika, which meant "restructuring", of the communist economy and political system.
The speedy reforms — from opening to trade to privatising many state-owned enterprises — were designed to bring the Soviet Union's command and control economy closer to a regulated market economy.
"Little did he know that by doing this, by essentially instituting these reforms, he would release the genie out of the proverbial bottle," Dr Grgic said.
While there was popular support for Gorbachev's initial measures, within a few years he faced heavy criticism from conservatives and liberals alike over the speed and scale of the changes.
By 1990, workers were protesting in expectation of price increases and rising unemployment and Gorbachev acknowledged the country was in a precarious balance because of the uncertainty over how the reforms would impact everyday life.
Meanwhile, glasnost had also encouraged a wave of democracy protests throughout the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev refrained from using force in 1989 — a decision that saw him awarded a Nobel Prize — as these movements broke out across the eastern bloc, paving the way for republics to break away and become autonomous states.
It spurred on the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ultimately came with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev on Christmas Day 1991.
In the West, the last Soviet leader was revered and celebrated, having freed Russia from the chains of communism and ushered in democracy.
But in Vladimir Putin's eyes, Gorbachev's legacy brings a deep sense of bitterness.
This was the man who had allowed the once glorious Soviet empire to be carved up into pieces, in what Putin believed was the "greatest catastrophe of the 20th century".
The moment relations soured between Gorbachev and Putin
While they could not have been more different men, the relationship between Gorbachev and Putin started on a largely positive note.
Gorbachev, an intellectual who loved a well-cut designer suit, wholeheartedly supported the former KGB officer with a mysterious past.
He welcomed Putin's leadership after years of what he described as chaos and disorder under former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and regularly sprang to his defence when allegations of corruption were floated.
In 2006, LA Times writer Matt Welch recalled an interview where "Gorbachev's smile disappeared, his eyes narrowed to lumps of burning coal" at the suggestion Putin was departing from democracy.
"For the next 10 minutes or so he barked out an angry lecture defending Putin and savaging the United States for working actively to humiliate Russia and make her experiments with democracy and capitalism fail," Welch wrote.
But things shifted as Gorbachev realised that this young new leader would not be the kind of great reformer that he had envisaged in his mission to liberalise modern Russia.
"It became quite clear that the two men saw the world and Russia's place in it quite differently," Dr Grgic said.
She says the pivotal moment came about a decade ago, when Putin returned for a third presidential term following an election marred by allegations of fraud and the largest protests in post-Soviet history.
Gorbachev grew frustrated with Putin's apparent obsession with power at all costs, declaring him "an obstacle to progress" in Russia.
"Since then, [we've seen] the stripping of constraints on executive power that Vladimir Putin wields, and … [Russia] by some standards, looking more like a dictatorial regime with the most power reserved for the top level, for one person," Dr Grgic said.
Gorbachev repeatedly pushed for legislative reform to allow genuinely democratic elections that would ensure "genuine participation by the people in the political process".
"We need strong presidential authority. In Russia, it is crucial that people should trust the president and be able to believe him," he wrote in 2016.
"Yes, Russia needs a strong leader, but not a Führer, not a Stalin."
In later years, there were some aspects of Putin's approach that Gorbachev supported — he was banned from Ukraine over his support for the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
Gorbachev told one paper he would have acted no differently if he were in Putin's shoes.
But the mission to expand into the rest of Ukraine appeared to be a bridge too far.
A confidant reportedly told Swiss newspaper Blick that Gorbachev "strongly condemned the war in Ukraine from the very beginning", and had made several attempts over the years to contact Putin directly.
"But he never called back. He didn't even pick up the phone," he said.
Revered by the West, but scorned at home
While his death was met with a tepid response in Russia, Gorbachev was hailed as a hero by foreign leaders.
It was a dichotomy he experienced throughout his life: Revered in the West, and reviled at home.
"That difference in perceptions couldn't be starker and more diametrically opposite," Dr Grgic said.
"Putin sees Gorbachev as the architect of Soviet demise and undoing. A lot of people actually pin the blame of the lost decade of the 90s … directly on Gorbachev.
"On the other hand, in the West, everyone thinks of Gorbachev as the leader that the West could finally deal with and see eye-to-eye."
The chasm between his image at home and abroad was perhaps best captured in his 1998 appearance in a Pizza Hut commercial.
As he serves up a slice of American fast food to his granddaughter in the newly opened store in Moscow's Red Square, a Russian family debates his legacy.
"Because of him we have economic confusion," the father says.
"Because of him, we have opportunity," the son retorts.
Gorbachev appears to have occasionally expressed nostalgia for Russia's past dominion over Europe.
He mourned the loss of Crimea and celebrated its annexation by Putin.
And he complained bitterly about America's "arrogant and self-confident" three-decade-long victory lap after the end of the Cold War.
But unlike many of his comrades, he was seemingly immune to the deep-rooted Russian fear of the West.
He modelled in a cheeky ad campaign for Louis Vuitton in 2007 and struck up a friendship with Barack Obama.
The former US president wrote in his memoir that the once towering figure of the 20th century was "a strangely tragic figure" discarded by his own nation.
"I could tell he was disappointed — a reminder for both of us of the fleeting, fickle nature of public life," Obama wrote.
Russia is now led by a man who believes his destiny is to counter Western decadence and build a Eurasian empire with Moscow at its core.
In Putin's Russia, there was simply no place left for Mikhail Gorbachev.
