#Politico #Navalnas #struck #Putin #grave #time
Instagram photo/Aleksey Navalny and Yulia Navalnaya
Even while lying in a coffin, he managed to do what seems impossible in today’s Russia: call thousands of people to the streets in an act of collective resistance not seen since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine two years ago, according to Politico.
VIDEO: Crowds chant: “Thank you, Alexei!” and “Putin is a murderer”
If he were alive, Navalny, a great lover of dark humor, would probably have enjoyed his own funeral as the greatest proof of the Kremlin’s moral degradation.
From the moment Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, left for the prison colony north of the Arctic Circle where he died suddenly in mid-February, she said Russian authorities tried to blackmail her into holding a private funeral.
First, they refused to give her the body of A Navalny. Then A. Navalny’s allies could not find a place where they would agree to honor him. Later, it suddenly became impossible to find a hearse to take his body to the church.
V. Putin, who loudly refuses to call A. Navalny by name, seems to have decided that his political enemy should disappear underground, shrouded in silence, notes “Politico”.
But despite the threat of persecution, thousands of people publicly paid their last respects to Navalny in all Russian cities last Friday.
/Scanpix photo/Alexei Navalny’s grave
The largest crowd gathered in Moscow, where young and old people waited in lines for several hours in the cold in the Marjin district, where Navalny used to live, first at a Russian Orthodox church where services were held, and then at a nearby cemetery, where Navalny was eventually laid to rest. buried
It’s safe to say the crowds are just the tip of the iceberg, notes Politico. Many of Navalny’s supporters, including his entire team, fled Russia and had no choice but to watch events from abroad. Others in Russia could not or were afraid to participate.
On Friday, a live broadcast by Navalny’s team on YouTube attracted an audience of 250,000 viewers.
“Putin thought that Navalny’s problem would disappear with the man. However, he miscalculated very strongly”, Marija Pevčich, a close ally of A. Navalno, told the audience.
VIDEO: The slogans “Bring the soldiers home!” and “Ukrainians are good people” sounded at A. Navalny’s funeral.
Although Navalny’s team insisted the funeral was not a protest rally, presumably to minimize the danger to his supporters, for many Russians his death is both personal and political.
The first chants: “Navalna!” and “You are not afraid, neither are we” quickly turned into: “Russia will be free!”
And already in the afternoon, large groups also chanted: “No to war!”
“It was the strongest reminder for me today that politics in Russia is not dead, that people do not give up and continue to believe in a future without dictatorship, injustice and wars,” said Roman, a 24-year-old Muscovite who asked not to be named for security reasons.
The Russian state apparatus has been trying to turn A. Navalny into a toxic figure for many years. After his imprisonment in 2021 early on, his entire network was labeled an “extremist organization,” forcing his close allies into exile and his supporters into silence.
The most important thing is motivation
It is telling that A.Navalno’s wife Yulia, who pledged to challenge the Kremlin after her husband’s death, and the couple’s children Daria and Zakhar did not attend the funeral and remained outside of Russia. Instead, they posted touching thanks on social media.
Ahead of the funeral, fearing reprisals, rights group Pervy Otdel advised mourners not to even bring photos or images of the opposition leader, although Russian law does not prohibit this.
“Everything that has happened around Alexei Navalny in recent years shows that when it comes to this man, the authorities do not speak the language of law, but the language of the street, prison and brute force,” said Pervy Otdel lawyer Dmitry Zair-Bek.
But if the Kremlin hoped that Navalny’s death would show that he had succeeded in wiping out any opposition, it instead gave the Russians a key motivation to stop hiding.
Immediately after A.Navalno’s death, people across Russia brought flowers to the monuments of Soviet-era political repression in their cities.
Authorities picked up the flowers and made hundreds of arrests.
Kremlin officials ‘don’t want to look like Satanists in front of their own conservative electorate’
Rights group OVD-Info reported that around 100 people were detained in around 13 cities. However, in Moscow, the authorities mostly chose a non-conflictual path.
According to analyst Abbas Galyamov, it appears that the Kremlin has decided to avoid public clashes in the capital ahead of the closely staged presidential election.
“Everything threatened to go too far: a battle against a dead person and obvious disrespect to A. Navalno’s mother,” analyst A. Galyamov told Politico. Kremlin officials “don’t want to look like Satanists in front of their own conservative electorate,” he said.
Instead, it appeared to be aimed at controlling the crowd and stopping the flow of information, he added.
Ahead of the funeral, students and civil servants were told not to attend, and some people were given advance notices by the police. On the day itself, the mourners had to deal with a non-functioning internet and difficult access to the church and cemetery.
Church and cemetery workers hurriedly carried out the funeral procedure, so only a few were given the opportunity to say goodbye to the deceased before his coffin was buried.
Destroys the myth of the Kremlin
However, the queues of those who want to support Boris Nadezhdin and at A. Navalny’s grave undermine the Kremlin’s narrative that the Russian leader and his war have the unanimous support of Russians. These lines also gave anti-Kremlin Russians much-needed hope and an opportunity to express themselves, the publication notes.
“Long [žmonių] queues have become a new way for Russians to participate in politics,” Kiril Martynov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe, told Dožd TV channel.
When asked about A.Navalno’s funeral, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment, only reminding that Russians must comply with protest laws, which prohibit any public discord.
So, in the end, A. Navalny had the last word, Politico says.
As his coffin was lowered into a freshly dug grave, musicians played Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ followed by his final song from his favorite film, Terminator 2.
Scanpix/AP Photo/Lyudmila Navalnaya (left) and Ala Abrosimova at the grave of Alexei Navalny
