Russia has farewelled Mstislav Rostropovich, the genius cellist and freedom campaigner who died on Friday.
Rostropovich's farewell was treated with the same kind of reverence as the burial of former president Boris Yeltsin, giving some indication of the famous dissident's stature in his country.The Queen of Spain and the wife of French President Jacques Chirac were among 4,500 mourners who bade farewell to the cellist, who studied under the great composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But it was Rostropovich's friendship with writer Alexander Solzhenitysn that led to his exile from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was stripped of his citizenship four years later.
Rostropovich settled in the US where he became one of the Soviet Union's most famously outspoken dissidents, advocating freedom of speech and democracy.
In 1989, he played a piece by JS Bach as the Berlin Wall crumbled behind him. Two years later, he stood alongside Yeltsin to help defeat communist hardliners who attempted to stage a coup against the newly democratic nation.
But for all his astounding musical achievements, Rostropovich cited the 1990 restoration of his Russian citizenship as the most important moment of his life.
Rostropovich passed away at the age of 80 in a Moscow cancer clinic.
