Mourners gather for Navalny’s funeral in Moscow

Long lines of people, some holding flowers, formed in Moscow on Friday for the funeral service of Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, two weeks after his mysterious death in a remote penal colony in the Arctic.

Hours before the planned funeral rites, Mr Navalny’s family had not received his body from a Moscow mortuary. a spokeswoman said. But the body was eventually handed over at around 12.30pm local time, she said.

Planning for the service took place under pressure from Russian authorities, who have arrested hundreds of mourners at memorial sites since Mr Navalny’s death. There was a heavy police presence around the church where the funeral services would take place in the afternoon.

The services are held at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God, Soothe My Sorrows, a Russian Orthodox church in southern Moscow. Images on social media showed attendees lining up, as well as security cameras that local news media reported had been recently installed, and signs prohibiting mourners from taking photos or videos inside the church.

Still, Ivan Zhdanov, who like many of Mr Navalny’s close associates is in exile outside Russia, encouraged people to come to the church and said police had not arrested mourners as many had feared.

“People come to say goodbye, and no one touches them,” Mr. Zhdanov said. “Anyone who wants to come and say goodbye can do so.” Also Mr Navalny’s supporters created a website for supporters to light a virtual candle in his memory.

Asked Friday if he could comment on Navalny’s political legacy, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov said: “I cannot.” He suggested that the Kremlin would crack down on anyone who tried to protest during the funeral. “Any unsanctioned meeting will be against the law,” Peskov told reporters during a daily phone call.

The funeral was not mentioned in the top stories of state news agencies RIA Novosti or TASS.

In the past two weeks, members of Mr. Navalny’s team have repeatedly complained about the difficulty of negotiating with Russian authorities over the release of Mr. Navalny’s body to his family, which took days, and reaching an agreement to find a place for the funeral services.

Members of his team described difficulties convincing a church, a cemetery and even a hearse to participate in the funeral, saying authorities wanted to prevent Mr Navalny’s funeral from becoming a flashpoint for dissent would become.

On Thursday, allies of Mr. Navalny, who was 47, described systemic pressure on all hearse drivers, saying that several people who had agreed to take Mr. Navalny’s body from the church to the cemetery had withdrawn at the last minute withdrawn, citing threats. His team and his wife blamed the Kremlin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Their claims could not be independently verified.

“Two people are responsible for the fact that we do not have a place for a civil memorial service and farewell to Alexei – Vladimir Putin and Sergei Sobyanin,” said Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya. wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.

“People in the Kremlin killed him, then they mocked Alexei’s body, then they mocked his mother, and now they mocked his memory,” she added. “We don’t want any special treatment, just to give people the opportunity to say goodbye to Alexey in a normal way.”

While Mr Navalny has opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the church where he will be buried has shown public support for it. Photos posted on VK’s social media page on Monday showed priests outside the church driving a Lada car bought for soldiers taking part in what Russia calls its ‘Special Military Operation’.

Two days earlier, a post showed letters sent by young parishioners to soldiers for “Defenders of the Fatherland Day,” a holiday honoring veterans.

According to Mr Navalny’s spokeswoman, the official medical report concluded that the cause of death was “natural causes”, which his family, supporters and human rights watchdogs dispute each other. In the past year and a half, Mr. Navalny was ordered to spend 296 days in a punishment isolation cell, known in Russian as “SHIZO.” It is considered the most severe form of legal punishment for prisoners in Russian prisons.

“They tortured him with hunger, they tortured him with cold,” his aide Leonid Volkov said during a livestream of the funeral on Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel. He sued for six months to gain access to a dentist, which was ultimately denied.

The Kremlin has rejected the family’s allegations about her involvement, and Mr. Putin has not commented publicly on Mr. Navalny’s death. But Russia’s leader approved an order promoting the deputy director of the country’s Federal Penitentiary Service, Valery Boyarinev, just three days after Mr Navalny’s death.

And Putin appeared defiant Thursday in an annual speech, threatening the West with nuclear escalation and praising Russia’s political system as “one of the foundations of the country’s sovereignty.”

Mr Navalny’s funeral comes amid a period of intense crackdown, and less than three weeks before Mr Putin seeks a new six-year term in elections scheduled for mid-March.

At least 400 people have been arrested since Mr Navalny’s death, according to the watchdog OVD-Info, including some for simply laying flowers at makeshift memorials to him. A priest who wanted to hold a funeral prayer for Mr Navalny in St Petersburg was arrested as he left his home.

One of Russia’s most respected rights activists, Oleg Orlov, whose organization Memorial shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for a piece he wrote condemning the invasion of Ukraine.

Local news media reported on Friday that police examined the passports of all attendees at Mr Navalny’s funeral during a security check before entering the church. These reports could not be independently confirmed.

There were fears that anyone who came to the funeral would be added to a database and possibly punished at a later date, rights lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told independent television channel Rain. Mr. Navalny’s organization shared information and offered legal advice to people planning to mourn him.

Oleg Matsnev reporting contributed.