Boris Yeltsin's sobbing widow stooped over his open coffin to kiss his face on Wednesday before the first president of independent Russia was lowered into the ground to the boom of a six-gun salute.
In an ironic twist for a man who tore up seven decades of Soviet rule, as Yeltsin was buried a military band played a few bars of the Soviet anthem: a tune he scrapped but which his successor Vladimir Putin restored as Russia's national anthem.
Watched by mourners including Putin, former US President Bill Clinton and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, Naina, Yeltsin's wife of 50 years, lingered for at least a minute at the graveside caressing his face.
The coffin lid was then secured and as Russian Orthodox priests in elaborately embroidered robes wafted incense around Moscow's Novodevichye cemetery, Yeltsin was lowered into the grave by mechanised hoists.
Crowds of onlookers gathered outside the cemetery to see Yeltsin's coffin arrive, pulled on a gun carriage by an armoured vehicle and flanked by goose-stepping soldiers. But there were fewer than one thousand people there - a reflection of Yeltsin's mixed legacy.
The service was in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a vast gold-domed building. Josef Stalin dynamited the original church but under Yeltsin it was rebuilt on the same site as a symbol of Russia's revival.
In a three-hour service, invited mourners filed past Yeltsin's coffin to pay their respects. A sombre-looking Clinton, one half of what was known in the 1990s for its public banter and bonhomie as "the Bill and Boris show", gave Naina one of his trademark hugs, pulling her tightly towards him and patting her back.
At a Kremlin reception after the burial, Putin said Yeltsin had "earnestly tried to make the life of millions of Russians better ... Personalities like that do not go away. They live on in peoples' ideas and ambitions."