Russia reburies Tsarist commander

Gen Anton Denikin led the White forces in southern Russia

A Tsarist general who led forces against the communist army in Russia's civil war has been reburied in Moscow in an act of national reconciliation.

General Anton Denikin led the White Army in its fight back against the 1917 Bolshevik revolution leaders.

His remains and those of philosopher Ivan Ilyin, and their wives, were transferred from their graves in the US and Switzerland for the ceremony.

They were buried with full military honours at Moscow's Donskoi monastery.

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexei II, praised the reburials as a sign that divisions within Russian society caused by the 1917 revolution were at last being bridged.

"Today's ceremony testifies to the unification of our people, divided by the tragic history of the last century," he said.

Dying wish

Film director Nikita Mikhalkov, who heads the Russian Cultural Foundation, said the reburial marked the "beginning of bringing the horrible civil war to an end".

Full honours for a general who was vilified by the communists

Gen Denikin fought under Tsar Nicholas II in World War I.

During the bloody civil war that followed the revolution, he was one of the leaders of the White Russian forces, anti-communist conservatives with backing from Britain, France and the US.

Their attacks against Leon Trotsky's Red Army were rebuffed and the Whites were driven back to the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Pacific - causing hundreds of thousands of White soldiers and civilians to emigrate.

Gen Denikin fled to Europe and died in exile in the United States in 1947.

"The last words of my father in the American hospital were 'I will not live to see Russia free'," Spanish news agency Efe quoted the general's daughter Marina Denikina as saying. She attended the ceremony on Monday.

Ilyin was an anti-communist philosopher who also fled the communists.