Yeltsin to lie in state in Moscow
Body to be displayed in Church of Christ the Saviour ahead of funeral on Wednesday.
Moskovsky Komsomolets said: “He was president of Russia for eight and a half years and not once … did he stifle the freedom of the press. Because of that we can now publish what we think.”
The president said it was thanks to Yeltsin that “a whole new epoch was born”.
“New democratic Russia was born, a free state open to the world. The state in which power truly belongs to the people,” Putin said.
“Fate gave him a tough time in which to govern, but history will be kind to him because he was courageous and steadfast on the big issues – peace, freedom, and progress,” Clinton said.
‘Serious mistakes’
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s predecessor, said Yeltsin had done “great deeds” but also made “serious mistakes”.
“I offer my deepest condolences to the family of a man on whose shoulders rested many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes – a tragic fate,” he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Obituary: Boris Yeltsin |
The White House called him “an historic figure during a time of great change and challenge for Russia”.
His defiance galvanised crowds of pro-democracy supporters and precipitated the collapse of the USSR in December 1991.
Sympathy and grief
“Boris Yeltsin has been well-and-truly off the political and public stage in Russia for seven years, since his resignation speech and the ascendancy of President Putin,” Jonah Hull, Al Jazeera’s Moscow correspondent, said.
Tony Blair, the British prime minister, said Yeltsin “was a remarkable man who saw the need for democracy and economic reform and in defending that reform he played a vital role at a crucial time in Russia’s history”.