MOSCOW - THE head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, has died, a church spokesman told AFP on Friday.

'Yes, he has died,' a church spokesman said by telephone after Russian news agencies said the patriarch, aged 79, died earlier Friday at his residence outside Moscow. There was no immediate word on the cause of death.

Patriarch Alexy II was an establishment figure who restored the authority of the church after decades of Soviet repression.

Born Alexei Ridiger, Alexy II made his ecclesiastical career at a time when the church was controlled by Soviet authorities before forging an alliance with the new Russian state under presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

The patriarch was an impressive character with a benign expression and moral authority among millions of Russian believers but his personality was always locked in by the deeply hierarchical nature of his role.

Alexy II took stances on foreign policy issues that often matched the Kremlin line, criticising Nato strikes against Yugoslavia, the US-led war in Iraq and defending the rights of ethnic-Russians in the former Soviet Union.

But his role in the international arena was marked above all by wariness of Catholics, and he refused repeatedly to meet Roman Catholic pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI.

The main reason for the row was a property dispute between the Catholic and Orthodox churches in Ukraine, where the Greek Catholic church, which was banned by Stalin and dispossessed, took back hundreds of parishes from the Orthodox church at the beginning of the 1990s.

The creation of four Catholic dioceses in Russia also created suspicion among Orthodox leaders. Several rounds of negotiations between Catholic and Orthodox officials failed to smooth differences.

He was also, however, a unifying Orthodox figure who helped engineer a union with a branch of the Russian Orthodox church that separated from Moscow-based church authorities after the 1917 Soviet revolution. -- AFP