MOSCOW, April 25 (RIA Novosti) - Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin was buried in a central Moscow cemetery Wednesday following a memorial ceremony attended by Russian and foreign dignitaries and earlier by thousands of ordinary Russians.
Unlike former Soviet leaders who were buried on Red Square, Yeltsin was laid to rest in the Novodevichy cemetery alongside Russian and Soviet writers, composers, scientists and politicians. The funeral was preceded by a church ceremony, the first for a former head of state since the Bolshevik revolution.
The coffin was taken on a gun carriage to the cemetery, the funeral procession was followed by President Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last Soviet president whom Yeltsin helped to oust, and foreign dignitaries such as two former U.S. presidents, Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr., former British Prime Minister Sir John Major; Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, representing the British royal family.
Thousands of Russians lined the two-mile cortege route from the Christ the Savior Cathedral, demolished under Josef Stalin in the 1930s and reconstructed under Yeltsin, to the Novodevichy Monastery. Yeltsin's body had laid in state at the cathedral from Tuesday till Wednesday, where an estimated 25,000 Russians had paid their last respects to the former leader.
After the last farewells from the widow, Naina Yeltsin, with whom he had lived for half a century, and their two daughters, and a prayer, the coffin was closed. As it was lowered into the grave, the Kremlin regiment gave a three-gun salute, and the national anthem was played.
Yeltsin, praised by many for pioneering democratic reforms and criticized by others for impoverishing millions during his tenure in the 1990s, died April 23 of heart failure at the age of 76. His irreconcilable adversaries from the Communist Party refused to stand up during the minute silence that opened a parliament session Wednesday and did not turn up at the memorial service.
Wednesday's comments on the party's official website described Yeltsin as a "strong personality" but reasserted that the Communists "ought not to bow to the memory of an architect of the bandit perestroika and thieving privatization."
Yeltsin was born and raised in the Sverdlovsk Region in the Urals. After graduating as a construction engineer, he became a career Communist bureaucrat but later fell out with the old guard in the party and in 1991 led a movement against the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union for Russia's independence. Reelected in 1996, he promoted Vladimir Putin and handed over presidential power to him three years later. Since his resignation, Yeltsin has stayed conspicuously out of politics.
The legislature and the city hall in the Sverdlovsk regional center of Yekaterinburg are about to launch a campaign to name one of the city's streets, parks, or squares after Yeltsin.
"The regional legislature has received numerous proposals from local citizens to commemorate Boris Nikolayevich's memory - proposals that I do not think we should ignore," regional legislature speaker Nikolai Voronin said.
Another proposal is to erect a monument to Yeltsin, who already has a memorial board on the house where he lived.
