The funeral for Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin will be held on Wednesday in the country's biggest church and will be followed by burial in a historic Moscow cemetery, officials said.
MOSCOW: The funeral for Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin will be held on Wednesday in the country's biggest church and will be followed by burial in a historic Moscow cemetery, officials said.
Russians' farewell to their late leader will begin on Tuesday with a lying-in-state from 1230 GMT and a service at 1300 GMT in Christ the Saviour, a lavish golden-domed church in central Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman said.
An official from the Russian Orthodox Church's office for external relations said that the liturgy would start at 0400 GMT followed by the main funeral service at 0800 GMT.
Former US presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, are among leading international figures who will be attending the ceremony, Russian news agencies reported.
German President Horst Kohler and leaders from ex-Soviet countries, including Armenia and Lithuania, which gained their independence in the Soviet collapse, have confirmed their attendance.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II has announced that three bishops will officiate at the funeral ceremony, church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin was quoted by RIA-Novosti news agency as saying.
The Christ the Saviour cathedral was destroyed in Soviet times and an open-air swimming pool was built in its place. The church was painstakingly rebuilt as an exact replica under Yeltsin in the 1990s.
The ceremony will be shown live on television as the nation holds a day of mourning, with flags flown at half-mast across the country and television entertainment programmes cancelled, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Yeltsin will then be buried next to leading Russian public figures such as playwright Anton Chekhov, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and opera singer Fyodor Shalyapin in the grounds of the Novodevichy convent in Moscow.
The convent, famous for its peaceful and picturesque setting by the Moscow river, was founded in the 16th century and inhabited by many female relatives of Russia's Tsars.
Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, will be the first Kremlin leader since Khrushchev -- outcast after his ouster in 1964 -- not to be interred by the Kremlin wall on Red Square.
Every other Soviet leader from Stalin to Konstantin Chernenko is buried in the plot behind Lenin's granite mausoleum, where the revolutionary leader lies embalmed.
The ex-president will lie in a section traditionally reserved for outstanding Soviet and Russian military men, not far from the grave of the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev, Raisa, state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported.
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