They queued for over a mile to stand near the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothes My Sorrows. Some clambered up the steps of a nearby building in southern Moscow to see the hearse arrive on Friday.
At first there was a hush. Perhaps the supporters of Alexei Navalny would be cowed by the presence of plainclothes police officers from the city’s anti-extremism department, who photographed people arriving with flowers.
Police cadets were also drafted in. One officer said that the authorities were concerned that the funeral service would turn into a protest rally. Then, the casket of Russia’s opposition leader arrived, and the applause began.
Soon there was chanting too. “Navalny! Navalny!” the crowd shouted. “You were not afraid and we are not afraid,” others cried. Even pupils from a nearby school leant out of their class windows to chant his name as police watched. “He wanted to live differently. He wanted people not to steal,” one mourner said to an officer.
The funeral was a watershed in modern Russian history and a sign of the country’s final retreat into dictatorship. Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony last month and his burial in Moscow marked the end of a decade-and-a-half-long chapter of resistance to the rule of President Putin.
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Many of the opposition leader’s supporters hoped Navalny would be a Russian Mandela, held for years in jail only to emerge, blinking and triumphant, and take the helm. It was not to be.
The gathering of thousands of his supporters for his funeral service and interment was surprising considering the repressive measures that might be deployed. Yet this was no tipping point, and such a large number of like-minded, dissenting people are unlikely to gather on Russian streets again any time soon.
Mourners struggled to be positive, repeating their leader’s call not to give up. But the events had an air of finality: Navalny the figurehead is gone, with no apparent replacement.
The day began with doubts that Navalny’s body would even be delivered to the church in Maryino district. Undertakers had been warned not to get involved, but eventually a hearse was found. The mortuary handed over the body more than two hours late. By the time the black Mercedes van arrived at the church, crowds of mourners had gathered.
Inside, Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, approached the open casket in which the campaigner’s body, dressed in a suit and tie, was laid on brocaded white cloth and covered with red and white flowers. She returned the following day to see a sea of tributes.
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A stream of mourners had made their way to the Borisovsky cemetery, chanting “Putin is a murderer!” and “Russia will be free!” Some threw carnations on the hearse as it passed.
The burial took place to the sound of Frank Sinatra’s My Way and the music from the final scene of Terminator 2, Navalny’s favourite film. Told by police to move quickly, mourners queued to sprinkle a handful of soil on the coffin.
Police lined the streets and metal barriers were put up outside the church and the cemetery to control the crowds. “This is the first time I’ve seen a maximum-security church,” a woman said. “I’ve lived here for seventy years and I’ve never witnessed anything like this.”
Navalny died, aged 47, on February 16 in the Polar Wolf jail in unclear circumstances. The authorities claimed he suddenly felt ill during a walk and lost consciousness. His family say he was murdered by the Putin regime, either directly or as a result of health problems caused by ill-treatment in prison and being poisoned in 2020.
The church was close to the apartment where Navalny once lived with his family. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and his children, Daria and Zakhar, now living abroad, were unable to attend over fears of Kremlin reprisals.
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Navalnaya, also 47, published a video on Instagram with scenes of the couple together and the caption, using her husband’s nickname: “Lesha, thank you for 26 years of absolute happiness. For your love, for always supporting me, for making me laugh even from prison, for always thinking about me… I don’t know how to live on without you, but I’ll try to do it so that you, up there, are happy for me and proud.”
Locals said they remembered Navalny and his family fondly. “We saw them regularly before, and his wife too, and his son, all together,” one woman said. “My daughter and I even went to vote for him when he participated in the [mayoral] elections.”
People came from as far away as Siberia to pay their respects. Viktoria and her mother, Elena, travelled from the Urals region. Viktoria said she worked for an oil company but took a day off to honour Navalny. She said she was afraid of repercussions if her bosses found out, but felt she had no choice.
“A person like Navalny is born here once every hundred years,” she said. “I see emptiness in the future. I understand that it will be worse, that there will be more repression and the screws will be tightened completely. Coming to Moscow today was scary, of course. But my conscience said that despite the fear, I had to be here.”
Mobile internet was jammed near the church. A crowd of about 15,000 people marched to the cemetery chanting: “No war!” “Freedom to political prisoners!” and “Hi, this is Navalny!” a reference to the phrase with which the opposition leader opened his online videos.
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Some people said they would have attended but were fearful of arrest. “My daughter begged me not to go,” said Pavel, a businessman. “So I stayed at home.” Others said they had been threatened with dismissal if they attended the funeral. “Everyone is very scared,” said Maria from Moscow.
A pensioner described the Kremlin’s heavy-handed tactics at the funeral as “a disgrace”. She added: “It’s not Christian, what are they doing? No matter what they feel about him, it is necessary to see a person off on his last journey normally. The world is watching this.”
At least 120 people were detained at memorials across Russia, according to the Russian rights group Ovd-info. The funeral came nine years after Boris Nemtsov, 55, another Kremlin critic who led anti-Putin protests with Navalny, was shot and killed near Red Square.
Navalny was the leader of Russia’s opposition movement for 15 years, bringing hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets to protest against Putin’s rule in 2011 and 2012.
He was poisoned with novichok nerve agent in 2020 and spent months recovering at a clinic in Germany. On his return to Russia the following year he was jailed and prosecuted on fraud and extremism charges widely seen as bogus.
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Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s former chief of staff, paused as he presented a live stream of events in Moscow from abroad. Navalny, he said, was the person “who brought us all together, united us, introduced us to each other, who made us one political force … even in prison he was beside us”.
Navalny’s supporters should heed his call not to yield in the event of his death, said Volkov, but that would be extremely difficult in their leader’s absence. “Now begins our grown-up political life,” he said.
