Boris Yeltsin's life in picturesKEY POINTS:
MOSCOW - Boris Yeltsin's sobbing widow stooped over his open coffin to kiss his face before the first president of independent Russia was lowered into the ground to the boom of a six-gun salute.
In an ironic twist for a man who tore up seven decades of Soviet rule, as Yeltsin was buried a military band played a few bars of the Soviet anthem: a tune he scrapped but which his successor Vladimir Putin restored as Russia's national anthem.
Watched by mourners including Putin, former US President Bill Clinton and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, Naina, Yeltsin's wife of 50 years, lingered for at least a minute at the graveside caressing his face.
The coffin lid was then secured and as Russian Orthodox priests in elaborately embroidered robes wafted incense around Moscow's Novodevichye cemetery, Yeltsin was lowered into the grave by mechanised hoists.
Crowds of onlookers gathered outside the cemetery to see Yeltsin's coffin arrive, pulled on a gun carriage by an armoured vehicle and flanked by goose-stepping soldiers.
But there were fewer than one thousand people there -- a reflection of Yeltsin's mixed legacy.
A bear-like man who had an easy rapport with ordinary people, Yeltsin became a hero to many Russians when he clambered onto a tank in 1991 to defy hardline Soviet coup leaders who wanted to roll back the perestroika reforms.
But in office he disappointed. His economic "shock therapy" turned peoples' savings into worthless paper, state assets were sold off to favoured businessmen at a fraction of their true value and his government was in turmoil.
In his last years in office, heart problems -- and reported drinking binges -- made Yeltsin a bumbling and distant figure prone to embarrassing gaffes.
"My parents dislike him because they liked living in the Soviet Union," said Olesya, in her 20s, who placed a bunch of yellow tulips at the closed gates of the cemetery.
"I was also born in the Soviet Union but I like having a choice and that is what Boris Nikolayevich (Yeltsin) gave me."
Befitting a man who broke with Communism, Yeltsin became the first Russian head of state since Tsar Alexander III in 1894 to be seen off in a church funeral.
The service was in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a vast gold-domed building. Josef Stalin dynamited the original church but under Yeltsin it was rebuilt on the same site as a symbol of Russia's revival.
In a three-hour service, invited mourners filed past Yeltsin's coffin to pay their respects.
A sombre-looking Clinton, one half of what was known in the 1990s for its public banter and bonhomie as "the Bill and Boris show", gave Naina one of his trademark hugs, pulling her tightly towards him and patting her back.
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.
A senior Communist official, Yeltsin quit the party because it was too slow to reform. He was the driving force behind an agreement to split up the Soviet Union into independent states.
Critics say Putin, whom Yeltsin anointed as his successor, has rolled back many of his reforms by tightening state control over politics, the media and the economy.
At a Kremlin reception after the burial, Putin said Yeltsin had "earnestly tried to make the life of millions of Russians better ... Personalities like that do not go away. They live on in peoples' ideas and ambitions."
In keeping with his populist style, Yeltsin's burial plot was between the graves of an illusionist, a ballerina and a heart-throb Soviet actor.
Russian media said Yeltsin's son-in-law, Valentin Yumashev, had vetoed a plan to put him among the generals and officials laid to rest in the cemetery.
- REUTERS
