Boris Yeltsin's widow Naina Iosifovna says farewell to her husband during his funeral in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow on April 25, 2007.
Photo: Äìèòðèé Äîíñêîé
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The First President's Last Road
// The World Buries Boris Yeltsin
The funeral of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin took place yesterday in Moscow's elaborate Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov accompanied Russia's first democratically elected president on his final journey.
The nation's goodbye to its first president lasted all evening, throughout the night, and into the morning of the day of the funeral. I arrived at the Church of Christ the Savior at the stroke of midnight and joined the line, which brought me to the threshold of the church at three o'clock in the morning. And in that line was a whole distinct story in my life, in the life of my city, and in the life of my country.
Entrance to the church was closed before noon the next day, when a delegation from the Moscow city government and several regional governors came to stand in succession next to the body of Boris Yeltsin. The church, which used to strike me as being so enormous, turned out to seem too small to hold everyone.
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| Photo: Ria-Novosti |
| The interment of Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically-elected president, at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow on April 25, 2007. |
Before the funeral, three buses loaded up to drive to the cathedral from Staraya Square near the Kremlin. The buses carried student friends of Boris Yeltsin, Kremlin officials, artists whom he and Yeltsin's widow Naina Iosifovna had befriended, members of the government…and all three were packed to the gills. As I headed towards them in the metro underpass, I saw Russian presidential aide Aslanbek Aslakhanov galloping towards me with an expression of genuine despair on his face. I somehow immediately gathered that he had not managed to buy any flowers and that he had realized that it would have been unthinkable to get on those buses without flowers in hand. And of course, he was afraid that he wouldn't make it, because this was one time when they wouldn't wait for him.
Many of the people on the buses had not seen each other in a long time, and it seemed that they were talking about everything but the subject on which nothing new has really been said for the past two millennia. Each of them spoke in half-whispers about their own pet subjects, and everything that they said was about the life of this man, to whom they were much more indebted even after his death than he had ever been to them in life.
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| Photo: Dmitry Donskoy |
| The funeral for Russia's former president Boris Yeltsin in the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior was the country's first state funeral since the death of Communist Party General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, and the first funeral for a Russian head of state to be carried out in accordance with Russian Orthodox Church rites since that of Tsar Alexander III in 1894. |
We climbed out of the buses on the Moscow River embankment and filed into the church through the back door instead of the front entrance, which was still as crowded with people as it had been during the night. As we entered the church and climbed up to the main level via a narrow circular staircase, former Moscow Central Municipal Region head Alexander Muzykantsky reached into his pocket and pulled out a small round pin featuring a portrait of Boris Yeltsin placed against the background of the Russian tricolor and crowned with the slogan "Yeltsin is our president!" He told me he had kept it from the elections in 1996, the very same elections that had felled the first president of Russia with ill health and worse luck. I took the pin and weighed it in my hand. It was like new.
In the church, State Duma deputies Vyacheslav Volodin, Artur Chilingarov, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky stood on the opposite side of the coffin from us. They were tightly hemmed in on all sides by their colleagues, of whom there was a veritable army. Understandably, the only exceptions were the Communists: Boris Yeltsin had vehemently disliked them during his presidency, and his attitude didn't change at all when he stepped down from the post. They paid him back in kind that morning by refusing to stand for a moment of silence in his honor, knowing that for the first time ever he would be unable to answer them back. In the church, however, I overheard from several different people that someone – when we least expect it – will come forward to take up his torch.
The people who had arrived on the buses began to move towards Naina Iosifovna and Yeltsin's daughters and grandchildren.
"Hang in there," I heard the visitors say. "Hang in there."
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| Photo: Dmitry Donskoy |
| Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife Lyudmila during the funeral of Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. |
At one point I suddenly realized that Naina Iosifovna was not only thanking the people who approached her to say a few poor words that all seemed so predictable and stale in the situation at hand. She was actually trying make a little conversation with each of them, attempting to comfort them and bolster their spirits.
"He was a saint," they said to her, having in mind the original, most important meaning of the word. He was sinful, but he was a saint.
"Yes," she answered, "and he departed during the Easter season. Take care of yourself, that's the most important thing – you take care of yourself."
I looked up and found myself just two meters from Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last president, which whom Boris Yeltsin had had a difficult relationship while he was alive. Now things were simpler. Mikhail Gorbachev had found it within himself to come on this day to bury the hatchet, and now he stood there looking lost and somehow suddenly aged: it was obvious that he was suffering like few others in the church. It was as if he had lost a piece of himself with the death of Boris Yeltsin, but he was one of the few who did not break down as he gazed on the coffin of the man who had never done him evil in life, who had never revenged himself for the kinds of things for which people usually exact revenge if they have the opportunity. And Boris Yeltsin had plenty.
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| Photo: AP |
| Former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, one of the leaders of the opposition movement The Other Russia, expresses his condolences to the family of Boris Yeltsin. |
I observed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky beginning to edge his way towards the exit through the stifling throng on the other side of the coffin. I thought that he had simply been here for awhile and had decided that he had paid his dues to the man to whom he owed more than possibly anyone else in the church, but a few minutes later he turned up next to me: he had come to speak with Boris Yeltsin's family. He seemed truly distraught, and not because his birthday had coincided with the day of the funeral of the first president of Russia.
A few other people from that side of the coffin had seen Vladimir Zhirinovsky's maneuver and tried to copy it, but by that time all extraneous movement in the church had ceased. Boris Yeltsin's daughter Elena was helped from the church, her legs visibly unable to support her. Ten minutes later, however, she returned and took the hand of her mother, who had been standing alone and upright the whole time.
The foreign guests began to file into the cathedral. There were many of them, and I saw fairly few familiar faces from the current wave of world history.
"My condolences," they said one after another, approaching the members of the family. "My condolences."
They retreated a bit, but still occupied the already tight spot a few meters from the coffin.
After a brief pause, British former prime minister John Major and American ex-presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Senior entered. Bill Clinton's face wore a childish, vaguely bewildered half-smile, like someone apologizing for the fact that his presence was out of place and that he knows it, but that he couldn't not come. He stood longer than anyone else embracing Naina Iosifovna, and I saw him pat her on the back, and she hugged him like a relative, because she knows how much tied her husband to this man, what passions roared then, how real the war was and how real the peace. She seemed to know exactly how sincerely and deeply this man had loved her husband, and it was clear how grateful she was to him for that.
Eventually stepping away from Naina Iosifovna, Bill Clinton went to go and join his colleagues, but the sight of the coffin suddenly pulled him up short. He stood there for a minute, peering into the dead man's face. It was absolutely comprehensible why he had come to Moscow: Clinton was saying goodbye to Yeltsin. I caught myself thinking that almost no one else there had done the same. For many in that church, the figure of Boris Yeltsin had already been relegated to history.
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| Photo: Dmitry Donskoy |
| Boris Yeltsin's grandson Boris (right) and son-in-law Valery Okulov (left) make room next to Yeltsin's coffin for Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko (foreground) and Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. |
A few minutes later, the second president of Russia arrived, along with several first (and, in my opinion, last, simply because they have no intention of handing over power, much less doing so as effortlessly as Russia's first president) presidents of Russia's neighbors: Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was also in attendance, making all the right moves.
They all stood next to a mingled crowd of federal security service officials: current ones with earpieces and microphones up their sleeves, and former ones who had worked with Boris Yeltsin and had come to say their goodbyes to him.
Metropolitan Kirill gave a brief biography of the deceased ("A gifted young man, Boris graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute and soon began to work in construction…"), read a message from Patriarch Alexei II, a friend of Yeltsin's who was unable to visit the church yesterday due to illness, and began the service, which lasted for almost an hour and a half.
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| Photo: AP |
| Former US president Bill Clinton embraces Boris Yeltsin's widow Naina Iosifovna (top right) before Yeltsin's funeral. Other foreign dignitaries in attendance included former US president George H.W. Bush (left), greeting Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana Yumasheva (right), and former British prime minister John Major (lower left), greeting Tatiana's husband Valentin Yumashev (lower right). |
After the service, a handful of the people in the church boarded the buses for the ride back to the Kremlin, where a memorial reception was due to take place at 16:00. Meanwhile, approximately 150 people, Boris Yeltsin's nearest and dearest, headed for the Novodevichy Cemetery, where a fresh grave yawned from the middle of a large plot just off the central walkway.
At first Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov had suggested burying the first president of Russia in an totally different spot, near the wall that contains the ashes of people who have been cremated and between the graves of Raisa Gorbacheva and General Alexander Lebed. Luzhkov claimed to be motivated by Yeltsin's supposed comment when Lebed was buried in 2002: "Save a spot here for me."
Incidentally, Yury Luzhkov was apparently the only one who heard that particular statement, but he was soon insisting on it, even when his deputies cautiously pointed out that the grave of a president needs to have extra space around it to accommodate all the people who are going to visit, and that the spots by the wall are unusually small.
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| Photo: Dmitry Donskoy |
| Several senior government officials pay their respects at former president Boris Yeltsin's funeral in Moscow on April 25, 2007. From right: Boris Gryzlov, Dmitry Medvedev, Sergei Mironov, and Sergei Ivanov. At left is Yeltsin's predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev. |
The buses did not take the most direct route to the cemetery, because, as I understood it, the short space of a day and a half had made it difficult to organize a safe route for such a procession. The buses rolled slowly down Kutuzovsky Prospect, where relatively few people were out on the streets. All of the drivers had climbed out of their stopped cars, but on their faces I saw none of the usual rage at a traffic obstruction. Several people waved, while the rest stood silently, and I thought to myself that they should be thanked for that, for not arrogating to themselves the right to remain in their seats as the coffin containing the body of the first president of their country passed before them. They had all gotten out of their cars for the express purpose of standing to greet the procession.
When the buses turned onto the Savvinsky embankment, I observed that there were still not many people out. And understandably so, because no one had announced the route that Boris Yeltsin would take on his last journey. Just then we passed the British Embassy, and I suddenly saw that the balconies were packed with people, and that people filled the windows of all the offices and the open spaces near the building. The balconies of the surrounding buildings were empty or nearly so.
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| Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin |
| The flag-draped coffin of former president Boris Yeltsin, whose stand on top of a tank during the 1991 coup attempt inspired Russia to break with its Soviet past, is lifted onto a gun carriage for the trip into the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. |
Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street was blocked off, and it was only here, right next to the Novodevichy Cemetery, that I finally saw a sea of people. All they had known was where the buses would end up, and so that's where they had come.
The coffin was loaded onto a gun carriage, and the group of 150 or so people who had traveled with it gathered around to follow it slowly up the street. The sidewalks were lined with captains and majors from the armed forces, instead of police from the Interior Ministry, as might have been expected. Behind them stood crowds of people, who threw flowers under the pallbearers, photographed the procession with their mobile phones, and wept openly. Here, near the entrance to the Novodevichy Cemetery, was where people were grieving, and somehow it was clear here in a way that it had not in the church: a man has died.
I remembered how I had once ended up in a group of people who had unexpectedly received a visit from Boris Nikolayevich and Naina Iosifovna. When they were introduced to my wife, who was expecting our son Vanya any day, they were told that she might pop right then and there and that everyone should be prepared.
"Don't be afraid," Yeltsin said, with terrible concern in his eyes, "nothing will go wrong. I'll take you to the hospital myself. Rest assured – I know what to do."
He didn't get jokes like that.
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| Photo: Dmitry Kostyukov |
| The procession carrying the coffin of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin arrives at the gates of the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. At the right is the Novodevichy Convent's landmark belltower, while the Moscow State University building can be seen in the background. |
The memorial service at the cemetery was brief. When the moment came for Boris Nikolayevich's family to say goodbye, I heard Naina Iosifovna say that maybe she shouldn't go up there, and I thought that perhaps she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to hold herself together. But she walked up to the coffin and gazed down at her husband, screening him from the gaze of two television cameras trained on him from two different angles. She discreetly placed a white handkerchief into the coffin before carefully sprinkling his face with kisses, as if she were afraid she might miss a spot. She seemed to want to make sure that he remembered these kisses forever and did his best not to think any more upsetting thoughts. She did not send her husband off – rather, she accompanied him, refusing to the last to leave his side.
As the gravediggers lowered the coffin into the ground and began to sprinkle it with clean sand that had been brought especially for the purpose, members of Boris Yeltsin's family also took fistfuls of sand to throw into the grave. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a short, poorly-shaven old man in soldier's boots and captain's epaulets, his chest full of pins and medals, suddenly step decisively forward out of the crowd next to me and, just as decisively, as if into his last battle, approach the grave with a bouquet of flowers.
I asked if anyone knew who he was.
"That's a veteran of the democratic movement in 1991," said UES Energy Systems head Anatoly Chubais, himself a veteran of the democratic movement (and also from approximately the same time period).
"Incidentally," said another man standing nearby, "he has not betrayed his principles, which is a rarity in this day and age."
"He probably had no reason to change his principles," said someone else.
"In other words, they didn't offer the right price?" asked another.
People here knew what they were talking about.
Vladimir Putin left the cemetery when the wreaths were lying on the grave. He could have done nothing more for Boris Yeltsin than he has done over these last two days, and he was undoubtedly patting himself on the back for how he had said farewell to his predecessor.
On the way back to the Kremlin it was quiet in the bus. Artur Chilingarov told me a story about how a team from the Moscow city government once played a soccer game against a team from the federal government. The captain of the Kremlin team was Boris Yeltsin, who, once he saw that his team was losing, decided to send a new goalkeeper onto the field: commentator Vladimir Maslachenko. Artur Chilingarov himself was the referee for the game and objected that the substitution was not allowed because Vladimir Maslachenko was not a member of the government. "Now he will be," growled Boris Yeltsin, and during a break in the game he called up Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and asked him to prepare a decree appointing Vladimir Maslachenko to the position of deputy minister for sports and fitness. That done, Maslachenko went on to save everything that came at him that day.
In the Kremlin, those who had come directly from the church had already been waiting for almost two hours. However, the group that had gone to the cemetery had since split in two, with Boris Yeltsin's relatives staying for awhile alone at the cemetery, so the wake didn't start until they arrived fifteen minutes later.
Never had the tables in the Hall of St. George looked as impressive they did that day: they were lined up in three rows each 150 meters long, in the standard configuration for a wake.
Vladimir Putin gave a short speech in which he called Boris Yeltsin a man of iron will and genuine determination.
"Only such a leader could have roused this country and turned it around," he said. "He changed the face of power… In 1996 he gambled with his health, and maybe also with his life, and he won… He had a fate that is given to very few: to become free himself and to bring millions along with him."
Ekho Moskvy radio station editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov, who was sitting across from me, said that it was the best speech from the head of the government in all of his seven years in office.
The actor Gennady Khazanov, who was sitting next to him, said quietly that he had sometimes wanted Boris Yeltsin not to have done things that he did and, on the other hand, sometimes to have done something that he hadn't.
"But now I think," he said, "that I didn't understand anything then. Now I know that we often mistake our desires for the objective situation of things, but we don't actually comprehend that situation. We only grasp that something isn't going our way, and we don't understand the objective course of history."
He recounted how, in 1991, he had learned about the deciphered prophecies of Nostradamus, which said that a great soviet empire would begin to fall apart in June 1991.
"And in June 1991 Boris Nikolayevich became president of Russia," he said. "You see, history simply chose him, and he did what he could with the role."
"History got lucky with him," I murmured, staring awestruck at the man who had so quietly said all of that and who was even smiling slightly.
"And now Burbulis has arrived!" chirped the actress Galina Volchek from her perch next to Gennady Khazanov, as the former state secretary of Russia come up and embraced her around the shoulders from behind. "By the way, BURbulis or BurBULis? I've spent a hundred years not getting it right," she said, changing the stress as she repeated the name.
"Whatever Galina says, that's what it is," he replied.
It was tangible how they had been conversing with these same words for all these years.
Initially, no one other than Vladimir Putin addressed the room at large. Several months ago, when Boris Yeltsin's 76th birthday was celebrated in this very room, approximately the same guests were in attendance, but on that occasion they could hardly be induced to part with the microphone. And now everyone was quiet.
Then Naina Iosifovna stood up, clearly very upset.
"A deep bow to everyone," she began, "who shared the bitterness of the loss of our Boris Nikolayevich. Everything was so warm, so lovely…although people probably don't usually talk like that about funerals. I've never seen anything like it… Vladimir Vladimirovich spoke at such length and said so much… If Boris Nikolayevich could have heard, he would have been happy."
She spoke slowly but without pausing, apparently having forgotten the presence of the interpreter. Then she sighed, apologized, and began to pause occasionally, which seemed to be easier for her, since speaking was so difficult.
"We lived a long life, more than half a century together, and he was truly a unique individual – I was always astonished by him… In 1989, when he came home from the Party meeting and said that it was necessary to save Russia, truthfully, I was frightened. And it worked out…"
It seemed that she wanted to add "he saved it…," but then lost her nerve.
"He invested enormous energy in saving Russia," she continued. "He was a man who shone brightly, and he left in the bright days of Easter. God saw to it that he lost consciousness immediately…and he never even knew that he was leaving us for so long… Forever."
Her composure finally slipped, and she broke down in tears.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 26, 2007
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