For Navalny’s followers: a “wave of inspiration” during a sad event

Elena Milashina, a daring Russian reporter who was beaten unconscious and doused with liquid iodine last year, said she has said goodbye to far too many journalists, activists and opposition figures who died an untimely death.

But never before, she said in a telephone interview from Moscow, had she 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 optimistic funeral I can remember,” said Ms. Milashina, 47, citing the large crowd and a palpable sense of unity. “There was no sadness. There was a wave of inspiration that we are all together, and there are many of us.”

The funeral of opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Friday may go down in history as a pivotal moment in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. It was a day that saw the president’s decades-long nemesis laid to rest, underscoring Putin’s dominance; but it was also a day when an ocean of pent-up disagreements resurfaced, if only for a few hours, on the streets of Moscow.

Hopes for a better Russia “died the day we all heard they had killed Navalny,” Ms. Milashina said. “But today I felt – you could really see it – that it had come back to life.”

Mr Navalny spent his last three years in prison under increasingly inhumane conditions. But many opposition-minded Russians still saw him as their Nelson Mandela, about to emerge as leader of a democratic Russia.

His death on February 16 appeared to cap Putin’s 24-year consolidation of power, two years after the Kremlin’s massive invasion of Ukraine accelerated the Kremlin’s turn to authoritarianism.

More than 20,000 Russian protesters were arrested in the weeks after Putin launched his invasion in early 2022. A new law allowed judges to impose multi-year prison sentences for dissent as simple as an anti-war post on Facebook. Opposition activists and independent journalists fled the country, and many of those who remained were imprisoned or remained silent to avoid that fate.

As a result, it was far from clear that Mr Navalny’s funeral would draw large crowds. But a 19-year-old woman named Anastasia made the trip from the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk and said she found “smiling and happy people” who “realized they were not alone.”

“We just stood next to each other and felt united,” Anastasia said in a telephone interview, in which she asked that her last name not be made public 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 were unable to enter the church for the short service or reach his grave. Instead, after emerging from the nearby metro station, Mr. Navalny’s supporters were directed by police officers with megaphones through streets and alleys to line up along the sidewalk in a line leading to the church.

There was no separate wake in a funeral hall allowing the public to pay their respects one by one, as happened at the memorial service for Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who died in 2022. aides claimed that the Kremlin blocked their efforts to organize such a service because it feared an outpouring of dissent just two weeks before the presidential election, which would preclude any meaningful opposition to Putin winning a new six-year term are excluded.

Navalny’s supporters, in turn, feared large-scale arrests. Hundreds of mourners were held at makeshift memorials for Mr Navalny across Russia in the days after he died. But on Friday, Russian authorities largely let the funeral take its course, perhaps thinking they would be better off avoiding scenes of police brutality.

“Everyone was ready to be held,” Ms. Milashina said. “Everyone was a little surprised that no one was holding them.”

But most of all, she said, people were amazed at the size of the turnout.

They threw their flowers at Mr. Navalny’s passing hearse. Footage from the scene showed them shouting ‘No to war!’ chanted. and “Peace for Ukraine, freedom for Russia!”

Another chant was “Hello, it’s Navalny” – the opposition leader’s slogan at the start of his popular YouTube videos. The message seemed to be that Mr. Navalny’s movement would live on even after the leader’s death.

Mikhail, 36, a history teacher from Moscow, said he saw “many, many more people” than he expected. He said people in the crowd discussed how to keep the fight against Putin alive, recognizing that “we can no longer hide behind a big Navalny.”

But he said he had no illusions about what would come next: a new Kremlin crackdown.

Authorities will “come with some form of retaliation, some kind of revenge,” he said. “They will try even harder to intimidate everyone.”

Ms. Milashina has already been in the crosshairs of frequent violence distributed to critics of Putin’s regime. In the southern Russian region of Chechnya, where Ms Milashina has done so repeatedly documented human rights abuses, a beating by masked men last year left her with brain damage and broken fingers. Since 2000, six journalists from her newspaper Novaya Gazeta have been murdered.

But on Friday, Ms Milashina – who has remained in Russia despite the risks – expressed confidence that her country would change. The large turnout at Mr. Navalny’s funeral underlined that hope, she said.

“A country with this kind of history does not change in one moment,” she said, predicting that Russian politics would sooner or later take a different direction. “It’s a pendulum – a historic pendulum.”