Moscow ? Thousands of Russians, some weeping, many carrying flowers, lined up Tuesday to bid farewell to Boris Yeltsin, whose body lay in state in a replica of a cathedral that was blown up by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and rebuilt in the new Russia birthed by the former president.

The open coffin at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Wednesday’s planned burial in the historic Novodevichy Cemetery are part of the first full Orthodox Christian funeral for a Russian leader since Czar Alexander III was buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg in 1894.

Yeltsin, 76, died Monday of heart failure.

The former president was not especially devout, but he viewed religious freedom as a democratic right. “By his strength, he helped the restoration of the proper role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the life of the country and its people,” church spokesman Metropolitan Kirill said in a statement.

One symbol of that was the restoration of the cathedral on a site that until the early 1990s was an open-air swimming pool. Stalin had the original cathedral dynamited, but the Soviet skyscraper planned in its stead never materialized because the terrain was unsuitable for such a building.

The foot of Yeltsin’s wooden coffin was draped with the Russian flag that the former president restored after the fall of the Soviet Union. A Kremlin honor guard of four soldiers, their hats held formally in the crook of their left arms, stood solemnly around the coffin. A large photograph of a hail and hearty Yeltsin, the bear of a man who once forced his will on this sprawling country, greeted mourners as they approached the coffin.

Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, flanked by their two daughters, Tatyana and Yelena, sat veiled and teary by the open coffin as mourners glided quietly past the waxen features of the dead president, who was dressed in a black suit and black tie. The viewing is to continue into the night before today’s burial, which former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush are scheduled to attend.

Yeltsin’s grave will be in a cemetery that lies alongside a startlingly beautiful nunnery where Czar Peter the Great banished his seditious sister Sophia.

The cemetery holds the remains of many Soviet and Russian notables, including former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.