Moscow – Hundreds of mourners – some weeping, many clutching flowers – filed past the open casket of former President Boris Yeltsin in a soaring cathedral Tuesday, paying tribute to a man who brought epochal changes to Russia but left behind a tarnished legacy.
The United States announced it would send former Presidents Bush and Clinton to today’s funeral for the first president of post-Soviet Russia. Yeltsin died Monday of heart failure at age 76.
Russians lined up under overcast skies to pass through metal detectors and into Christ the Savior Cathedral on the banks of the Moscow River.
Inside, white-robed priests chanted prayers and circled the casket through clouds of incense. Yeltsin’s widow, Naina, and his two daughters sat dressed in black.
“By his strength, he helped the restoration of the proper role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the life of the country and its people,” church spokesman Metropolitan Kirill said in a statement.
Christ the Savior Cathedral is a sign of the changes under Yeltsin, a reformer who was elected president in 1991 as the Soviet Union was falling apart and helped hasten its demise.
The gold-domed, hulking Russian Orthodox church is a replica of the original that was blown up by the Soviet authorities in 1931 just a few months after Yeltsin’s birth.
Sixty years to the month after Soviet authorities knocked the cathedral down, the Soviet Union collapsed, thanks in part to Yeltsin. Russia began to rebuild the church in 1994.
Unlike most Soviet leaders, he won’t be interred in the Kremlin walls. His grave will be at Novodevichy Cemetery, a leafy and comforting expanse next to Moscow’s most famous monastery.
