Elena Milasina, a brave Russian reporter who was beaten unconscious and doused with liquid iodine last year, said she has said goodbye to too many journalists, activists and opposition figures who died an untimely death.
But he had never, he said in a telephone interview from Moscow, seen anything like Friday’s scene on the streets of the sleepy Maryino neighborhood on the outskirts of the Russian capital.
“This was the most upbeat funeral I can remember,” said Ms. Milashina, 47, citing large crowds and a palpable sense of unity. “There was no sadness. There was this wave of inspiration that we are all together and that we are many.”
The funeral of opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny on Friday may be remembered as a landmark moment in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. It was a day in which the president’s decades-long nemesis fell, underscoring Mr Putin’s dominance. but it was also a day when an ocean of frozen dissent resurfaced, if only for a few hours, on the streets of Moscow.
Hope for a better Russia “died the day we all found out they killed Navalny,” Ms Milashina said. “But today, I felt — you could really see it — he was resurrected.”
Mr. Navalny has spent the last three years in prison, under increasingly inhumane conditions. But many opposition Russians still saw him as their Nelson Mandela, ready to one day emerge as the leader of a democratic Russia.
His death on February 16 appeared to represent a milestone in Mr Putin’s 24-year consolidation of power, two years after Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine accelerated the Kremlin’s turn towards authoritarianism.
More than 20,000 Russian protesters have been arrested in the weeks since Mr. Putin launched his invasion in early 2022. A new law allowed judges to impose multi-year jail terms for dissent as simple as an anti-war Facebook post. Opposition activists and independent journalists fled the country, and many of those who remained were imprisoned or remained silent to avoid this fate.
As a result, it was far from clear that Mr Navalny’s funeral would attract large crowds. But a 19-year-old woman named Anastasia made the journey from the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk and said she found “smiling and happy people” who “realized they were not alone”.
“We stood next to each other and felt united,” Anastasia said in a phone interview, asking not to be identified for her own safety. “Even if we were united by something so terrible.”
The vast majority of the thousands who came to mourn Mr Navalny on Friday did not make it inside the church for the short service or at his grave. Instead, after emerging from the neighborhood metro station, Mr. Navalny’s supporters led police officers with loudspeakers through the streets and alleys to stand along the sidewalk in a line leading to the church.
There was no separate wake in a funeral hall to allow members of the public to pay their respects one by one, as was the case at the memorial service for Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who died in 2022. Mr Navalny Aides claimed the Kremlin blocked their efforts to arrange such a service because it feared an eruption of dissent just two weeks before the presidential election, which has barred any meaningful opposition to Mr Putin from winning another six-year term.
Mr. Navalny’s supporters, in turn, feared major arrests. Hundreds of mourners were arrested across Russia at impromptu memorial services for Mr Navalny in the days after his death. But on Friday, Russian authorities largely let the funeral unfold, perhaps figuring it would be better to avoid scenes of police violence.
“Everyone was ready to hold on,” Ms Milashina said. “Everyone was a little surprised that no one was holding them.”
But above all, he said, people were surprised by the size of the turnout.
They threw their flowers at Mr. Navalny’s hearse. Footage from the scene showed them shouting “No to war!” and “Peace for Ukraine, freedom for Russia!”
Another chant was “Hey, it’s Navalny” — the opposition leader’s catchphrase at the start of his popular YouTube videos. The message seemed to be that Mr Navalny’s movement would live on, even with the death of its leader.
Mikhail, 36, a history teacher from Moscow, said he saw “many, many more people” than he expected. He said people in the crowd were discussing how to keep the fight against Mr Putin alive, acknowledging that “we can no longer hide behind a big Navalny”.
But he said he had no illusions about what was to come: another Kremlin crackdown.
Authorities “will start to pursue some kind of retaliation, some kind of revenge,” he said. “They will try even harder to intimidate everyone.”
Ms. Milashina has already been the target of frequent violence met with critics of Mr Putin’s rule. In the southern Russian region of Chechnya, where Ms Milashina has repeatedly documented human rights abuses, a beating by masked men last year left her with brain injuries and broken fingers. Six journalists at her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, have been killed since 2000.
But on Friday, Ms Milashina – who remained in Russia despite the dangers – expressed confidence that her country would change. The large turnout at Mr. Navalny’s funeral, he said, underscored that hope.
“A country with this kind of history doesn’t change in an instant,” he said, predicting that sooner or later Russia’s policy will change radically. “It’s a pendulum — a historic pendulum.”
