Boris Yeltsin's Legacy

After lengthy ceremonies in Moscow's gold-domed Christ the Savior Cathedral, chanting Orthodox priests led Yeltsin's weeping family to a 16th-century convent where he was buried alongside the remains of other celebrated Russians, including playwright Anton Chekhov.

The open coffin was carried to the Novodevichy convent on an olive-green gun carriage, with Putin and former US presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush among the mourners following behind.

Yeltsin's two daughters supported his widow Naina as she kissed her husband a final goodbye.

Then the coffin was shut and lowered into the ground to the accompaniment of three artillery salvos and the national anthem.

As many as 35,000 people, according to state television, had earlier paid their last respects at Christ the Saviour, a cavernous cathedral built while Yeltsin was in office in the 1990s as a replica of a religious landmark destroyed by Joseph Stalin six decades earlier.

Yeltsin died aged 76 on Monday from a heart attack.

Major impact

The elaborate, national televised funeral and day of mourning reflected Yeltsin's huge impact on his country.

In eight tumultuous years, he helped bring down the Soviet Union in 1991, and oversaw painful economic and democratic reforms dragging Russia into the modern age.

Putin, who is accused of reversing democratic gains of the Yeltsin era since taking over in 1999, paid homage to a "man with a soul of truly Russian scope and breadth."

"He changed the face of power, broke down the wall between society and the state and served his people with devotion and courage," Putin said at a memorial gathering at the Kremlin following the burial.

Not everyone with fond memories

Despite the official and international praise, polls show that a vast majority of Russians have painful memories of the economic turmoil of the 1990s, as well as Yeltsin's own history of drinking and ill health.

Many prefer life under ex-KGB officer Putin, who has stabilized the country.

"Yeltsin was drunk 17 times in public and his daughter is one of the richest people in Russia," one man said angrily outside Christ the Savior Cathedral.

Yeltsin's Western-backed reforms in the early 1990s led almost overnight to economic turmoil, spiraling prices, and the wiping out of pensioners' savings, while a handful of businessmen raked in vast fortunes.

Even some liberals are critical of Yeltsin, pointing to his disastrous decision to launch a war in rebel Chechnya, his alliance with corrupt business tycoons, and his handing over of power to Putin.

"Earned understanding"

However, many attending the funeral said that Yeltsin deserves understanding.

"Yeltsin freed me from the Communist disease. He gave me back my property," said doctor Nikolai Churyumo, 57, clutching a bunch of red carnations outside Christ the Savior.

"Now there's a drift from Yeltsin's policies. People have forgotten what he achieved," he added.

In addition to the former US presidents, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose career ended with Yeltsin's rise to power, also attended the funeral.

Other foreign dignitaries included Britain's former prime minister John Major, Poland's Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, and German President Horst Köhler, as well as heads of former Soviet republics that Yeltsin freed from Moscow's grip in 1991.

"Made emigration of Russian Jews possible"

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also said Yeltsin was the leader who had made it possible for hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel.

Olmert sent a letter of condolences to Russian President Vladimir Putin, expressing "sorrow" over Yeltsin's death "in the name of the Israeli government and the Israeli people."

"In the period of his leadership, the gates of emigration of the Jews of the former Soviet Union opened up," a government statement quoted the letter as saying.

Some one million Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Israel in the 1990s after the bloc's collapse. They currently make up at least 15 percent of Israel's population.

Russian Jewish leaders have also credited Yeltsin with ending decades of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

In Novodevichy, Yeltsin shares a final resting place with another noted reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who in the 1950s turned his country onto a new track away from the horrors of Stalinism.