|
|
|
|
|
|
25.04.07
|
The Last Rites
|
|
|
By Lara McCoy Roslof
|
Yeltsin Laid to Rest in Moscow.
World leaders and ordinary Russians gathered in Moscow today to bid farewell to a man who left his mark on history. Boris Yeltsin, who died Monday of heart failure at the age of 76, lay in state in the Christ the Savior Cathedral from 3:30pm Tuesday through Wednesday afternoon. Throughout the night, thousands of people from all walks of life filed through the church to pay their respects. The queue of mourners curved around the cathedral, toward the Moscow River and along Prechistenskaya Embankment. Many carried flowers and wore buttons declaring Yeltsin “the people’s president.” RIA Novosti reported that more than 25,000 people came to say goodbye to Russia’s first post-Soviet leader.
Wednesday was declared a day of national mourning and the city flag and the flag of the Russian Federation, each topped with a black ribbon, were displayed on most buildings around the capital. Flags on federal buildings flew at half-mast.
Former U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, whose terms as president overlapped with Yeltsin’s, attended the funeral service along with the leaders of several post-Soviet states, including the presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan and Lithuania and the prime ministers of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine. Following the ceremony, Yeltsin was interred in the Novodevichy Cemetery, the final resting place for many well-known Russian statesmen, writers and artists.
Yeltsin’s funeral was the first state funeral in Moscow since the death of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985, whose service was the third such ceremony in a 15-month span, closely following the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev and Yury Andropov. Chernenko’s memorial service –which, incidentally, George H.W. Bush also attended when he was vice president – was held in Red Square as the members of the politburo looked on from the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s Mausoleum.
The elements of Yeltsin’s memorial, which may set a precedent for all state funerals in post-Soviet Russia, involved many components common to both Soviet and Western state funerals. A statement from Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the service would have the appropriate honors for a state funeral, including an honor guard, gun carriage, salute and farewells from foreign officials.
However, it is uniquely appropriate that the Orthodox funeral liturgy for Yeltsin, the first religious funeral service for a Russian leader since the death of Emperor Alexander III in 1894, took place in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a building demolished in the 1930s and reconstructed during Yeltsin’s time in office as part of his efforts to bolster the church’s role and to create a new national identity for Russia.
The new Cathedral of Christ the Savior opened on Dec. 31, 1999 – the day Yeltsin resigned the presidency in favor of Vladimir Putin and Russia opened a new chapter in its history. Yeltsin made those new beginnings possible, and despite his many failures, which have been well-publicized in the years since he left office, he was remembered today as a great figure without whom contemporary Russia would be fundamentally different, if it existed at all. |
| The source |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The virtual community for English-speaking expats and Russians
