St Petersburg, the old imperial capital, bade farewell to the murdered politician Ms Galina Starovoitova yesterday with all the remorse and dignity which accompanied the laying to rest of so many other admired victims of unknown killers.
The burial of the 52-year-old democrat in the Alexander Nevsky monastery, where the graves of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Fyodr Dostoyevsky also lie, was attended by thousands of ordinary people and by Russia's first three post-Soviet prime ministers.
"The duty of the authorities now is to punish those who carried out the murder," said one, Mr Sergei Kiriyenko. "The rest depends on us."
But the grief was matched by elements of shame and hypocrisy. The uncompromising liberal Ms Starovoitova was liked only by a very narrow group of Russians, and only with her death has a wider part of society been shocked into realising the depth of the abyss the country is now facing.
The TV bulletins gave heavy coverage to the funeral remarks of another ex-premier, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, who said: "These shots were fired at all of us. I want to say once more that the authorities must acquire true authority in order to defend their citizens."
Yet Mr Chernomyrdin is a man whose support for bullying local Russian tyrants like the President of Bashkortostan, Mr Murtaza Rakhimov, went against everything Ms Starovoitova stood for. Mr Chernormyrdin was said in a report leaked to the New York Times by the CIA to have been unequivocally corrupt.
Before the burial, the funeral service was held in the grand setting of the Marble Hall of St Petersburg's Ethnographic Museum. The burial had to be delayed for several hours because of the number of mourners who wanted to file past the open coffin.
Ms Starovoitova, a deputy in Russia's State Duma, was shot dead on Friday night on the stairway of the canalside block of flats where she had her St Petersburg home. The building was just a few yards from the headquarters of the local riot police.
Investigators said yesterday that they had gained little information from their first interview with the other victim of the shooting, the deputy's aide, Mr Ruslan Linkov, who was seriously injured.
Most Russian newspapers commented bitterly yesterday on the failure by the law enforcement agencies to solve a single one of the series of contract killings of journalists and deputies since the collapse of the USSR. There have been a few arrests but no one has been charged or put on trial - mainly because, it is popularly believed, the trail leads to the very top of the new Russian establishment.
It was bitterly cold in St Petersburg yesterday, and the short winter day was already drawing to a close as Ms Starovoitova's coffin was lowered into the ground. The grave was close to that of a prominent St Petersburg businessman, Mr Dmitri Filippov, murdered a month ago.
Referring to the events of the past few days and to Mr Yeltsin's illness, the Moscow News commentator Lyudmilla Telen wrote: "The president is sick. What about us - are we so healthy?"
Reuters adds: In Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, condemned the murder of Ms Starovoitova, whom she recalled having met in Moscow earlier this year. "Even before going to the Russian Federation I knew her to be a consistent supporter of human rights in the State Duma and an anti-war campaigner," Mrs Robinson said in a statement issued by her office in Geneva.