Former United States president Bill Clinton embraced Boris Yeltsin’s widow with one of his trademark hugs on Wednesday as he paid his last respects to the man with whom he formed a diplomatic double act in the 1990s.
Yeltsin’s widow, Naina, and his two daughters, Tatyana and Yelena, clad in black, their eyes puffy from crying, sat beside his open coffin as a stream of serving and past Russian politicians and foreign guests filed past.
In a moment of reconciliation, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — a long-standing rival left without a job when Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet Union — kissed Naina and whispered words of condolence as he gripped Yelena’s hand.
A sombre-looking Clinton, one half of what was known for its public banter and bonhomie as ”the Bill and Boris show”, stooped to put his right arm around Naina’s shoulder, pulling her tightly towards him and then patting her gently on the back.
In the cathedral of Christ the Saviour — blown up by Josef Stalin and rebuilt under Yeltsin as a symbol of national revival — a Russian Orthodox choir sang psalms and soldiers from the Kremlin regiment stood at each corner of the coffin.
Clinton was joined by fellow former president George Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major.
They were followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife Lyudmilla, who, after offering their condolences, sat down next to Yeltsin’s family to hear a funeral oration by Orthodox cleric Metropolitan Yuvenaly.
Yeltsin died of heart failure on Monday aged 76. But reflecting his mixed legacy, there was no outpouring of national grief. Many praise him as a father of Russian democracy but many others remember the chaos of his eight years in office.
In a break with the past that fitted Yeltsin’s maverick style, he was to be buried not alongside previous Kremlin leaders on Red Square, but at the capital’s Novodevichye cemetery alongside actors, writers and performers.
Many Russians blame Yeltsin for forfeiting the country’s superpower status, for a disastrous war in Chechnya and for reforms that that made citizens’ savings worthless and handed state assets to a tiny band of favoured businessmen.
”My mum thought Yeltsin was great because he gave us democracy. My dad hates him because he thinks he ruined a great country. I came here to have a last chance to see this man,” said Marina Shestakova, a student.
Mourning
In his last years in office, heart problems — and reported drinking binges — made Yeltsin an ailing and distant figure who was prone to embarrassing gaffes.
Putin rolled back many of his predecessor’s reforms, tightening Kremlin control over the economy, politics and the media. Most Russians applauded Putin because for them, the flowering of freedom under Yeltsin felt like anarchy.
Putin, whom Yeltsin handpicked to succeed him, declared Wednesday a day of national mourning.
Flags were flying at half-mast. State television was showing live pictures from the lying-in-state and footage from Yeltsin’s life set to sombre music.
Izvestia newspaper said Yeltsin was to buried in a plot next to Soviet-era illusionist Igor Kio, ballerina Galina Ulanova and actor Yevgeny Urbansky, whose biggest role was in a film called Communist, where he played a construction boss.
Yeltsin’s son-in-law, Valentin Yumashev, asked for him to be buried next to cultural figures, not alongside officials and generals, the newspaper reported.
Yeltsin was hailed around the world as a hero as he took on the Soviet establishment, at one point in 1991 climbing on a tank to rally a crowd against hard-line coup leaders who wanted to turn back the perestroika reforms.
Months later, he was the driving force behind an agreement to split up the Soviet Union into independent states. — Reuters