http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/25/AR2007042500394.html

Kinder View of Yeltsin Emerges in Eulogies

By Peter Finn

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 26, 2007; Page A20

MOSCOW, April 25 -- In the two days since former president Boris Yeltsin died, his official standing here has undergone a strange and unlikely transformation. He has been lionized by a political establishment that spent the last six years demonizing what it views as the anarchy and humiliation of Russia during his rule in the 1990s.

Yeltsin "sincerely tried to do everything possible to make the lives of millions of Russians better," President Vladimir Putin said at a reception after Wednesday's funeral, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

"Such personalities as Yeltsin do not die, they continue to live in the ideas and aspirations of peoples, in the successes and achievements of the motherland," Putin continued. "We have just said the last goodbye to Yeltsin. We said goodbye to a decisive person with strong will, a person of a scale and soul inherent to Russia."

"I have never heard such words in my life," Yeltsin's widow, Naina, said in response. "And Vladimir Putin spoke so succinctly. If Yeltsin had been listening to him, he would have been very pleased."

Indeed, Yeltsin heard little such praise when he was alive.

The explanation for such effusive eulogies may be as simple as the adage: Don't speak ill of the dead. But there was a head-spinning quality to the glowing commentary that was almost ubiquitous Wednesday.

Regular programming on state television Wednesday, a day of national mourning, was replaced by odes to the dashing, silver-haired Yeltsin, depicting him as the flamboyant revolutionary of yesteryear, the kindly grandfather in graceful retirement.

But there was little or nothing noted in between. No billionaire tycoons, no expansion of the NATO alliance, no poverty, no war in Chechnya, no economic collapse, no presidential drunkenness at international events.

Where did that Boris Yeltsin go?

Since Putin came to power in 2000, Yeltsin's Russia has been depicted as the incarnation of all that could go wrong with a country. That memory provided much of the ideological underpinning for Putin's construction of a strong, centralized state.

Once freewheeling institutions such as parliament, the press, political parties and regional executives have been brought to heel. The steely, sober, stabilizing Putin became the hugely popular antithesis of his predecessor. Yeltsin's chaotic democracy was transformed into something called "sovereign democracy" -- the turn of phrase of a Kremlin spin doctor that has come to mean the absolute ascendancy of executive power.

"On days like this you don't say bad things," said a host on Channel One, where some of Yeltsin's old cronies, rarely seen now on television, spoke fondly of their former boss Wednesday morning. Such reminiscing, however, never veered into any comparison with Putin. The potential juxtaposition of their very different approaches to democratic freedoms was left unexplored. In the first hours after Yeltsin's death, state television seemed paralyzed, unable to say anything. Stations did not interrupt their regular programming to announce his death even as international broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC aired lengthy biographies.

Yeltsin, 76, died of heart failure at 3:45 p.m. Monday. Channel One did not announce the death until 6 p.m. NTV, once the center of crusading broadcast journalism in Russia, waited until 6:40 p.m. "They took their cue from Putin," said journalist Yulia Latynina. "They don't know how to react independently."

At first the Kremlin had nothing to say beyond announcing the death. Later Monday evening, Putin spoke warmly of his predecessor and praised his role in the establishment of Russian democracy. Since then, the coverage has been lavish and laudatory, covering every aspect of the funeral liturgy and Wednesday's burial.

At the graveside, Naina Yeltsin stood in silence for a long time, caressing her husband's hair, apparently unable to say the last farewell. She placed a gift in the coffin, kissed him and pulled a silk shroud over his face.

The coffin's lid was closed and the former president's body was lowered into the hallowed ground of Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.

A three-gun salvo was fired, followed by the playing of the Russian national anthem.

The burial followed a televised one-hour, 25-minute service at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, led by two dozen Orthodox clergy. The ceremony featured a choir performing the funeral liturgy.

A letter from Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II was read out. "The whole dramatic history of the 20th century was reflected in the fate of Boris Nikolayevich," said the patriarch, using Yeltsin's patronymic. "Being a strong individual, he took upon himself responsibility for the fate of the country at a difficult and dangerous time of radical change."

The service and burial were attended by Putin, the Russian cabinet, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and numerous foreign dignitaries, including former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush and Lech Walesa, the Polish trade unionist who, like Yeltsin, drove a stake into communism.

In the cathedral, a replica of one dynamited by Joseph Stalin and rebuilt under Yeltsin, the former president lay in an open casket. Mourners, in turn, paid respects to the family. Clinton, who had a close if occasionally turbulent relationship with Yeltsin, embraced Naina Yeltsin at length.

As Clinton, Bush and former British prime minister John Major walked into the cathedral, they were described by a television announcer as the world elite from the 1990s. On other days, they have been depicted in the mass media as part of a conspiracy that enslaved Russia, which was restored to its greatness only under Putin.

Both the funeral liturgy and the burial were closed to the public. But beginning Tuesday before the service, at least 20,000 Russians filed past the coffin to pay their final respects.

It was never likely that Yeltsin, deeply resented by many Russians because of the privations of the 1990s, would draw a massive outpouring of grief. But the Kremlin seemed quietly determined to keep any popular response to a minimum. There was little and belated notice of the public viewing of the body.

From the cathedral, Yeltsin's coffin was taken on a gun carriage to the cemetery. The family, Putin, members of the government and some of the foreign dignitaries walked behind. The long walk appeared to tax former president Bush.

But all was not placid and mournful. Communist lawmakers, who clearly still resent Yeltsin for his role in the fall of the Soviet Union, refused to stand during a moment of silence in parliament Wednesday morning.

"We will never give honor to the destroyer of the fatherland," said Communist legislator Viktor Ilyukhin, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

The deputy speaker of parliament, Oleg Morozov, chided the Communists. "We are not only politicians, but human beings in the first place," he said. "Don't be blasphemous."