Clinton hugs Yeltsin’s widow Naina as former US President George H.W. Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major look on. (AP)

Moscow, April 25 (Reuters): Boris Yeltsin’s sobbing widow stooped over his open coffin to kiss his face today moments before the first president of independent Russia was buried with full state honours.

Watched by mourners including President Vladimir Putin, former US President Bill Clinton and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, Yeltsin’s wife of 50 years Naina spent a minute caressing his face, flanked by her weeping daughters.

Earlier, at a three-hour funeral service, a sombre-looking Clinton, one half of what was known for its public banter and bonhomie as “the Bill and Boris show”, stooped to put his right arm around Naina’s shoulder, pulling her tightly towards him and then patting her gently on the back.

In a moment of reconciliation, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — a long-standing rival left without a job when Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet Union — kissed Naina and whispered words of condolence.

An artillery battery outside the walls of the Novodevichye cemetery fired three salvoes and the Russian national anthem sounded as his coffin was lowered into the ground.

The coffin carrying Yeltsin — the man who dismantled the Soviet Union then led Russia through its first, chaotic years of independence — was brought to the cemetery on a gun carriage as mourners walked solemnly behind.

Hundreds of onlookers lined the final part of the route; but there was no outpouring of national grief over Yeltsin’s death on Monday, from heart failure at age 76.

That reflected his mixed legacy. Many Russians praise him as a father of Russian democracy but others blame him for forfeiting the country’s superpower status, and for reforms that made citizens’ savings worthless and handed state assets to a tiny band of favoured businessmen.

In a break with the Soviet past, Yeltsin was buried not alongside previous Kremlin leaders on Red Square but at a cemetery in the grounds of a monastery alongside actors, writers and performers.

The funeral service was a vivid reminder of the changes brought by Yeltsin, the man who became Russia’s first democratically elected president.

It took place in a Russian Orthodox church — not the secular ceremony in Moscow’s Hall of Columns that the Soviet Union laid on to see off its leaders.

Bearded Russian Orthodox clerics in richly embroidered robes sang psalms that rang out through the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, blown up by Josef Stalin and rebuilt under Yeltsin as a symbol of national revival.

Metropolitan Yuvenaly, the second most senior cleric in the Orthodox church, told mourners Yeltsin had given people the freedom they sought.

“Russia today lives a full life and is returning to its historic traditions. Witness to that is the fact that for the first time in 100 years we are bidding farewell to a Russian head of state in a church, with prayers.”