Marina, a lawyer from Moscow, decided to stay home when Russian opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny was laid to rest last Friday. He expected a large crowd and extensive arrests at Borisovsky Cemetery, given Russia’s current climate of repression, and thought it would be best to pay his respects another day.
She was not alone in this thought. When she came to put flowers on Sunday, she had to wait in line for up to 40 minutes, Marina said in a telephone interview from Moscow. (Like others, she asked that her last name be withheld for fear of retribution.)
After Mr Navalny’s funeral — when thousands of mourners waited outside the church and walked across the Moskva River to the cemetery where he was buried — the crowds were widely expected to thin out. Apparently, that was the hope inside the Kremlin. In the days since, however, the tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for those longing to see his vision of “the beautiful Russia of the future” come true.
But with the death of Mr Navalny, aged 47, in one of Russia’s harshest and most remote penal colonies, that dream now seems distant for Marina and many others.
“I didn’t think they would kill him in prison,” he said. “I thought it would actually come out and it would be a turning point and everything would change. I haven’t fully processed Navalny’s death. For now, I don’t know, I don’t have any vision for the future.”
This is not just because he died, he added, “but because the forces of evil are closing in,” a reference to Russia’s increasingly totalitarian tendency.
Marina and many others said the trip to the suburban Borisovo neighborhood where Mr. Navalny is buried was a healing experience. The grave is filled so high with flowers that it is often impossible to see the wooden cross at his head.
The line looked huge when Marina arrived with a bus full of people holding bouquets of flowers, she recalls, but it was twice as long as she left. Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet, is calculated that around 27,000 people used the nearest metro station on Friday, Saturday and Sunday to visit Mr Navalny’s grave.
“I felt much better when I saw how many people share the same values with me,” said Yulia, 47, who visited the grave on Saturday. “After Alexei’s funeral, I felt better emotionally, as if a weight had been lifted, because I saw that all the propaganda, all those miserable clowns on TV, have no influence on the majority of people.”
Both women said the crowd at the cemetery seemed to be made up of people of different ages and backgrounds. Marina said she noticed small notes left on the grave by people from Russian cities beyond Moscow.
Many of those attending Friday’s funeral had braced themselves for the possibility of being detained. No mass arrests were made, but authorities appeared to be using video and photos, from various sources, possibly to arrest people later.
It was not an idle threat. Since the funeral, reports have emerged of people who appeared in footage of the event being visited by law enforcement at the home and detained. That’s in addition to at least 400 people detained at makeshift memorials in the two weeks between Mr Navalny’s death and the funeral. The OVD-Info news agency reported that another 113 people in 19 cities across Russia were arrested on Friday for openly mourning Mr Navalny.
“They want to kill Alexei’s memory, they want to kill his ideas, but they can’t do it, because he put his ideas in the hearts and minds of people a long time ago,” said Nikolai Lyashkin, a politician who spent years of cooperation with Mr. Navalny.
“Alexei has always been, seemed and perceived as someone unbreakable, unshakable,” he said. “It was like a beacon showing the way forward, that things are bad, but we have to fight. Now the lighthouse has been removed and we must somehow sail on our own.”
In January 2022, Mr Navalny and seven of his associates were added to the Russian government’s official list of “terrorists and extremists”, putting them on the same legal footing as the Taliban, Islamic State and domestic far-right nationalist groups. (The Taliban can visit Russia freely, but associates of Mr. Navalny have fled the country to avoid arrest.) Last year, his organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund, was added to the list, making it illegal for anyone associated with thereby directing for public office and criminalization of association with the group.
That so many people continue to flock to the cemetery to mourn someone considered a “terrorist and extremist” is “an extraordinary event,” Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann said Tuesday on her YouTube channel.
“This is happening in Moscow, in the year 2024, after two years of war and a fairly massive exodus of precisely those people who supported Alexei Navalny or could support him,” he said.
Mr Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who also lives outside Russia, released a video on Wednesday thanking those who went to a grave that cannot be visited.
“Looking at you, I am convinced that everything is not in vain,” she said. “These shots are filled not only with sadness and grief, but also with hope. Alexei dreamed of a beautiful Russia of the future. And you are Russia. These days I saw a lot of warmth, kindness and unity. And this is precisely what distinguishes us from the people who sit in the Kremlin.”
In the video, he urged Russians to heed Mr. Navalny’s call, from the prison where he later died, to vote against Vladimir V. Putin in the presidential election at noon on March 17 in a show of political unity.
But the poll by the independent Levada Center is discouraging. Only one in 10 respondents after his death spoke favorably of his activities. About 20 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of people trying to commemorate Mr. Navalny, while a similar percentage had a negative attitude. “The majority,” the pollsters wrote, “is indifferent.”
For people like Shura Burtin, a freelance journalist, Mr Navalny’s death and its aftermath have led to a sense of despair.
“The hope that there will be something normal with Russia in the near future is dangerous,” Mr. Bertin wrote in Meduza, an independent news outlet based in Latvia.
“I think it’s important to feel our weakness,” she said. “It is clear that we have no future and that we are very weak. To see how cut off we are, how bad we are at helping each other.”
Unlike Marina and Yulia, Mr. Bertin is an exile outside of Russia. But he shared an urgent desire to surround himself with like-minded people after Mr Navalny’s death.
“When I found out about Navalny, I wanted to call everyone. For now, that’s the only thing that comes to mind – to be closer to each other,” he wrote. “I think it’s time to go into a state of emergency and try to behave differently.”
Marina said she wants to visit the grave again soon, perhaps when there are fewer people so she can say a proper goodbye without being pressured to move on.
