With her hands full of orange dahlias, Yelena Shtuna took her place at the end of the line, a good 50 meters from the entrance to the Chekhov Art Theater. Tears were running down her face.


"It has been so long since I cried," said Shtuna, 61. "My own mother died eight months ago, and I hardly cried at all. Sometimes it's so strange, the things that finally affect you."


When she heard that Innokenty Smoktunovsky had died Wednesday at 69, the pensioner knew at once that she would make the 135-kilometer journey into the city to pay her last respects to the man she called "the first, the last, and for me, the single actor of our time." She did not know how many people would join her.


"I confess I'm grateful to see this line," she said. "I was afraid no one would show up. I was afraid they would not remember."


Shtuna took her place in a crowd that police estimated at 3,000, which circulated through the theater and stopped traffic on Kamergersky Pereulok on Saturday afternoon. Smoktunovsky, who exploded onto the Soviet theater scene in the late 1950s, won global acclaim and local affection with his performances in 80 films and countless plays.


The mourners included many luminaries of the Russian theater world, while President Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev both sent telegrams. But the bulk of the crowd was an audience whose reverence for the actor never abated through a 40-year career.


"He was part of our lives. When we heard his voice on the radio, we stopped what we were doing," said Ella Muroshkovskaya, 58. "I hope Russian soil will see such a talent again."


Inside the theater, Smoktunovsky's body was on display, and hundreds of women drew bouquets out of their handbags to pile them on his coffin; the crowd was so large that many of the ushers were stuck in screaming matches with mourners who refused to leave the church. When the memorial service ended and pallbearers carried the actor's body out into the street, the crowd clapped so loud and for so long that the sound could be heard for blocks down Tverskaya Ulitsa.


By train from St. Petersburg came Vitaly Mateyev, a film actor who works at Lenfilm, where Smoktunovsky began his career. "He was from a different time, he embodied different values," said Mateyev, 59, who was carrying dark red roses. "We will not see any more like him."


Smoktunovsky made his name in the '50s and '60s, restyling the Soviet worker-hero into a more complex and ambivalent figure. Throughout the crowd was a pervasive nostalgia for an earlier era of artistic growth. Most of the group were shestidesyatniki themselves -- Russians who were young in the 1960s, testing the boundaries of state control.


"He kept his distance from the godless, ideological machine," said the critic Georgy Kapralov in his comments at the service. "He was an independent man who had no need of this structure."


"Smoktunovsky worked in a borderline situation -- between life and death, between freedom and captivity," said the writer Yury Borev. "The Russian intelligentsia have been in this position for their whole lives. Smoktunovsky was given to us during a tragic period in history, and he is a member of the academy of free artists."


Many mourners followed the funeral train south to Novodevichy Cemetery, where Smoktunovsky was interred later in the day beside such beloved masters as Fyodor Shalyapin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. As the procession moved through the cemetery, the crowd flowed out of the walkways and people clambered over gravestones to keep up.


It began to drizzle, and the mourners wore plastic shopping bags over their heads, but most stayed through to the end to bid farewell to Smoktunovsky. He is one in a series of beloved actors -- Oleg Borisov, Yevgeny Leonov, and recently Yevgeny Simonov -- who have died in recent months.


"It's good that we all came. These are not people who live by money. These are people who live by the spirit," said Shtuna, peering forward at the crowd.


"You have no idea what he meant to us," she said. "The first time I heard his voice, I just closed my eyes and wept."