Russian Police Deploy in Force as Thousands Mourn Alexei Navalny

Law enforcement officers walk outside the Mother of God Quench My Sorrows church after a f
ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
John Hayward

Mourners gathered for the funeral of opposition leader Alexei Navalny faced a heavy police presence in Moscow on Friday.

Navalny’s supporters chanted “We are not afraid!” as strongman Vladimir Putin’s security forces encircled them, while his widow Yulia Navalnaya posted a farewell on social media in which she promised to carry on his work.

“I don’t know if I can handle it or not, but I will try,” Yulia said in her public farewell to Alexei, who died under murky circumstances in an Arctic prison camp at the age of 47 on February 16.

Prison officials listed the cause of his demise as “sudden death syndrome,” but Navalny’s friends and supporters believe he was murdered on Putin’s orders, possibly with the same nerve agent Russian operatives used against him in 2020.

Yulia Navalnaya told her fallen husband she would “try to make you up there happy for me and proud of me.” She described her marriage as “26 years of absolute happiness,” even over the past three years, as Alexei languished in a series of prisons on dubious embezzlement and extremism charges.

The Kremlin warned Russians against attending “spontaneous memorials” for Navalny, but thousands turned out to remember him anyway. Squads of heavily armed police deployed to the cemetery where Navalny was laid to rest, as well as public facilities and train stations. The area was surrounded by barricades, metal detectors, and security cameras. Reporters covering the event said mobile phone services were disrupted in the area.

A line half a mile long formed outside the Mother of God Quench My Sorrows church in Moscow on Friday for Navalny’s funeral, after which he was interred in the Borisovskoye cemetery. The church is located in a district where Navalny once lived. 

Several other Moscow churches refused to hold the funeral, allegedly under pressure from the Putin regime. Navalny’s aides said they had trouble finding a hearse that would carry his body because hearse drivers received threats from “unknown people.” On Friday morning, the morgue inexplicably delayed releasing his body.

Navalny’s mother and father, Lyudmila and Anatoly, kissed his cheeks, while mourners lined up to caress his face before the coffin was sealed. Thousands more chanted “Russia will be free,” “No to war,” “Russia without Putin,” “We Won’t Forgive,” and “Putin is a murderer” outside the church and cemetery.

“I came here to say goodbye to Navalny. What does that mean for me? I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s very sad for the future of Russia,” one young mourner told Reuters. “We won’t give up, we will believe in something better.”

“There are more than 10,000 people here, and no one is afraid,” said another. “We came here in order to honor the memory of a man who also wasn’t afraid, who wasn’t afraid of anything.”

“They are so afraid themselves,” a mourner said of the Putin government while speaking to Agence France-Presse (AFP). “The people who came here, they are not scared. Alexei wasn’t either. People like him shouldn’t be dying: honest and principled, willing to sacrifice themselves.”

A woman outside the church compared Navalny to Putin: “One sacrificed himself to save the country, the other one sacrificed the country to save himself.”

Navalny was lowered into his grave while a band played Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and the melancholy closing music from the 1991 blockbuster Terminator 2.

“Alexei considered Terminator 2 the best film on Earth,” his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh explained.

Many of Navalny’s aides and closest allies could only watch the funeral from afar, having fled Russia under threats of arrest by the Putin regime years ago. Putin has been especially vigorous in fining and jailing his critics with new laws that make it illegal to “disparage” the Russian armed forces while they are fighting in Ukraine.

Yulia Navalnaya, who lives in Germany with her teenage son, did not attend the funeral in person. She told the European Parliament on Wednesday she feared Putin’s security forces would disrupt the services.

“I’m not sure yet whether it will be peaceful or whether police will arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband,” she said.

“My husband will never see what the beautiful Russia of the future will look like. But we must see it. And I will do my best to make his dream come true. The evil will fall and the beautiful future will come,” she declared.

The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday assigning “criminal and political responsibility” for Navalny’s death to the “warmongering, autocratic, and kleptocratic regime of the Kremlin” and its leader, Vladimir Putin.

The parliament gave its full support to Yulia Navalnaya and demanded an “independent and transparent international investigation into his murder.”

U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy and French Ambassador Pierre Levy did attend the service on Friday, bringing flowers for Navalny. Several dozen arrests were reported on Friday, but apparently not the mass roundup Yulia Navalnaya feared.

Ambassador Tracy issued a statement on Friday that mourned Navalny’s passing “for what he represented for the Russian people and what his death signals for Russia’s future.”

“The Russian constitution promises the Russian people freedom of speech. However, Mr. Navalny was persecuted, poisoned, imprisoned, tortured and died for what he believed he needed to say to the Russian people and to the world,” she said.

“It is a difficult thing for the global community to see his mistreatment and his death, but it is stark evidence of the dark and frightening direction the Kremlin is taking its people,” she warned.

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