A bishop planning a public prayer for Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was arrested as he left his home. Two men were arrested for having a picture of Mr Navalny in a backpack. Another man who laid flowers at a memorial said he was beaten by police officers for the small act of remembrance.
As thousands of Russians across the country sought to express their grief for Mr. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, Russian police cracked down, temporarily detaining hundreds and jailing more than two dozen.
Until Mr. Navalny’s death at age 47, many observers believed the Kremlin would limit the crackdown until after the presidential election in mid-March, when President Vladimir V. Putin has secured a fifth term. Much more now they fear the arrests portend a wider crackdown.
“Those who detain people are afraid of any opinion that is not connected to propaganda, to the pervasive ideology,” said Lena, 31, who carried a sticker at the Solovetsky Stone, a memorial to victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. “Don’t give up,” the sticker read — part of a message Mr Navalny once recorded in the event of his death.
Another placed a copy of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” on the pediment, while others hung chains of paper cranes, candles and a photo of Mr Navalny smiling with opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015 in his shadow Kremlin.
Lena, who gave only her first name for fear of retaliation, began to cry. “They are afraid of Navalny in prison,” he said, “they are afraid of the dead Navalny, they are afraid of the people who bring flowers here to the stone.”
He said: “That’s why it’s important to keep doing what we’re doing, what this man did.”
At least 366 people have been detained in 39 cities across Russia since Mr Navalny was pronounced dead, with 31 of them ordered to spend up to 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info, a Russian organisation. human rights office that monitors the arrests. . The rest were released after being detained for a few hours. About half of those arrested were in St. Petersburg, said Dmitry Anisimov, the group’s press secretary.
In Samara, Russia’s ninth-largest city by population, those who remembered Mr. Navalny had to have their passports photographed before being allowed to place their flowers in the snow, according to Caution, News, an independent Russian-run outlet. socialite.
Officials have not released Mr Navalny’s body to his family – the official cause of death remains unclear – and no funeral plans have been announced.
“Grief is a collective action, and any collective action is by definition political,” said Grigory Yudin, a Russian sociologist and researcher at Princeton University. “In Russia, if a collective activity is not ordered, it is basically prohibited.”
In Surgut, a city in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region in western Siberia, Bakyt Karybaev said he was beaten during a five-hour detention after laying flowers at a makeshift memorial for Mr Navalny. He told The New York Times in a telephone interview that the officers hit him on the head with their palms, put a gun to his head and forced him to lie on the floor with his arms outstretched.
“They told me I’m a fascist because I support the fascist Navalny,” Mr. Karibaev said. “Then they told me to confess the real reason I wanted to put flowers. They asked if I knew who the monument was dedicated to. I told them it was to those who were oppressed in the Soviet Union.”
Mr Karybaev was released after signing a warning acknowledging he would face a criminal investigation if he did anything similar again. He said he was now taking sedatives to try to calm down.
In Moscow, two men were arrested on a bridge near the Kremlin, where since 2015 activists have maintained a monument to Mr. Nemtsov, the opposition politician who was assassinated that year. According to OVD-Info, the two men, Boris Kazadayev and Ilya Povyshev, were questioned by police, who arrested them after finding a photo of Mr Navalny in a backpack belonging to one of the men.
And in St Petersburg, a bishop who planned to hold a public prayer for the dead in Mr Navalny’s honor was arrested as he left his home on Saturday, then hospitalized after suffering a stroke in police custody. The bishop, Grigory Mikhnov-Vyatenko, planned to hold the prayer near the city’s Solovetsky Stone, a monument similar to the one in Moscow.
While protests are effectively banned in modern Russia, religious leaders are legally allowed to hold services in public without prior consent. Bishop Mikhnov-Vaitenko, a member of the Apostolic Orthodox Church, had posted his intention to hold the prayer the day before on his Facebook page and Telegram channel, which has more than 5,000 followers.
His next post appeared to be a selfie that looked like a mug shot at the police station where he was being held. He was charged with organizing a public assembly that amounted to a “breach of public order”, which carries a possible prison sentence of up to 15 days.
Then, late on Saturday, an opposition politician, Lev Shlosberg reported that the bishop had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke.
Bishop Mikhnov-Vaitenko, a prominent human rights activist, severed ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in 2014 after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and instigated a proxy war in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church, the largest religious community in the country, has supported the Kremlin and given its no-nonsense stance to the invasion of Ukraine. On Saturday, his branch in St. Petersburg called on the public to ignore the bishop’s calls for public action in a Telegram post.
After his detention, the prayer was performed by a colleague of the Apostolic Orthodox Church. The video of the event shows several dozen people gathered around the Solovetsky stone, which was filled with flowers. As soon as the service ended, 10 people were arrested, according to MR 7. News, a St. Petersburg news outlet.
The severity of the crackdown drew condemnation from Mr Shlosberg, a veteran Russian opposition politician from the western Pskov region.
“Is the inability to hold a lawful and peaceful religious ceremony a serious or not serious enough consequence for society?” wrote on Telegram, saying that Russians were being denied the rights they are entitled to under the Constitution.
“Apparently, the authorities themselves do not understand where the limit of this lawlessness is,” Mr. Shlosberg said. “The intention to suppress every social manifestation, including natural grief, leads our country not only to the abyss of iniquity (no more rights), but to the abyss of misanthropy.”
While all this was happening, the state media broadcast regularly scheduled entertainment shows. News broadcasts showed reports from the Russian front near Avdiivka, the Ukrainian town that fell to Russian occupation forces on Friday, along with figure skaters at the All-Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow. And on Rossiya 1, the country’s flagship “News of the Week,” it spent much of its time replaying Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mr. Putin and the American media personality’s praise of Moscow’s public train system.
Alina Lombzina contributed reporting from London.
