Actor And Magician Yeltsins Neighbours In Cemetery

Russia's first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was laid to rest on Wednesday next to the graves of an illusionist.

Russia's first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was laid to rest on Wednesday next to the graves of an illusionist, a ballerina and a Soviet film star, Russian media reported.

Yeltsin's family had asked Moscow city authorities not to bury him among Soviet generals and statesmen at the prestigious Novodevichye cemtery as had been originally proposed, Izvestia daily wrote.

Instead, he was buried with full state honours off the cemetery's central alley next to illusionist Igor Kio and actor Yevgeny Urbansky. Opposite is the grave of Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova.

Urbansky, a heartthrob film star of the 1950s and 1960s, won popularity after starring in prize-winning film Communist, playing the role of a construction manager.

Ironically, Yeltsin won prominence in the Communist party as a regional construction boss.

Valentin Yumashev, married to Yeltsin's younger daughter Tatyana, chose the former president's burial plot and marked it with chalk, Izvestia said.

The Novodevichye cemetery used to be open to the Soviet elite and a limited number of organised visitors. Yeltsin, who became Yeltsin's Communist Party boss in the 1980s, lifted the restriction and allowed free access.

The burly Yeltsin quickly won the hearts of Muscovites by denouncing corruption and privilege after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him to the capital from his native region in the Ural mountains.

Raisa Gorbacheva, wife of the Soviet Union's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev - Yeltsin's chief antagonist in the dying days of Soviet rule - is buried near Yeltsin at the cemetery.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin's personality cult but was later removed in disgrace, also share the cemetery with singers, composers and writers.