Russia prepared to bury former president Boris Yeltsin on Wednesday, mourning the man who dismantled the Soviet Union and piloted the country in its first chaotic years of independence.
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.
Former United States President Bill Clinton — who forged a close personal relationship with Yeltsin in the 1990s — was to attend the funeral, along with about a dozen former and serving heads of state and senior foreign officials.
The funeral service was to be held about midday local time at the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was blown up by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and rebuilt under Yeltsin in a potent symbol of Russia’s post-Soviet rebirth.
Yeltsin died from heart failure on Monday at the age of 76. His successor, Vladimir Putin, ordered a state funeral.
Throughout the night, mourners filed past Yeltsin’s open coffin at the cathedral. But by morning the numbers waiting outside had dwindled to about 200 — reflecting the split in Russian society over Yeltsin’s legacy.
Some admire him for ending communist rule and bringing freedom. Others, though, blame him for damaging the Soviet Union’s international prestige by his buffoonery and for reforms 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 Shetakova, a student.
Flags at half-mast
In accordance with a decree issued by Putin, flags across the vast country were flying at half-mast and television stations took entertainment programmes off the air.
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 started his career as a construction boss in his native Sverdlovsk region in the Ural mountains.
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 in the late 1990s as he took on the Soviet establishment, at one point climbing on a tank to rally a crowd against hard-line coup plotters 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.
But his eight years in office were marked by economic meltdown, political chaos, a costly war against rebels in Chechnya and drink-fuelled gaffes.
For many Russians the flowering of democracy seemed more like anarchy. After he stepped down the pendulum swung the other way and Putin, with the approval of the majority of voters, turned back many of Yeltsin’s reforms to impose tighter state control over politics, the media and the economy. — Reuters