News of Yeltsin's Death Stirs Mixed Feelings in Russia

MOSCOW, April 23 -- Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who died Monday of heart failure, will be buried Wednesday in the history-rich clay of Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, where elites of the Soviet Union and Russia, poets and politicians, scientists and spies, have traditionally been laid to rest.

President Vladimir Putin declared Wednesday a national day of mourning. But there was little sign of spontaneous grief over the former president's passing at age 76. Russia is deeply ambivalent about the legacy of Yeltsin, the country's first post-communist leader, who ushered in democracy but struggled to contain the chaos it first engendered.

"We will do everything so that the memory of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, his noble thoughts, and his words 'protect Russia' always serve us as moral and political guidelines," Putin said in a statement. "A man passed away, thanks to whom a whole new epoch was born. A new democratic Russia was born, a free state open to the world, a state in which power truly belongs to the people."

Despite the fond farewell, much of Yeltsin's Russia has been systematically dismantled by his successor. A boisterous, competitive, developing democracy with a crusading press has withered as the Kremlin has reined in parliament, taken control of broadcast outlets and weakened dissent to the point of extinction.

Yeltsin will not be buried in the Kremlin, the final resting place of most leaders of the Soviet Union. It was unclear whether that was a political statement by Putin's office or followed the wishes of the late president.

Revered by supporters in Russia and abroad as a bearish, sometimes unsteady but ultimately courageous man who had felled the Soviet Union and fathered a new Russian democracy, Yeltsin is widely seen here as a drunk who brought Russia and its people to their knees while the country was looted by his businessmen buddies.

He is also faulted here for the bloody humiliation of the Russian military in the breakaway republic of Chechnya and for Russia's perceived subservience abroad because of its lost superpower status.

"I hated him," said Igor Zhurkov, a 45-year-old construction worker. "The country was in total chaos under Yeltsin. Everything was stolen from the people, who were turned into beggars."

Yeltsin's battered image, trapped in the poverty of the 1990s, is not helped by the contrasts with today's much more prosperous Russia and with his successor, the sober and self-confident Putin.

But for all the derision, there were glimmers after Yeltsin's death Monday of a larger legacy that may ultimately be celebrated here.

"He made a lot of mistakes, of course, but he did change this country," said Valentina Surikova, 61, a retired doctor. "We could breathe freer than we do now."

International condolences, which poured into Russia, almost universally emphasized Yeltsin's democratic legacy.