Navalny mourners have been arrested for leaving flowers and fear worse is to come

A bishop who planned a public prayer for Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was arrested as he left his home. Two men were arrested for having a photo of Mr Navalny in a backpack. Another man laying flowers at a memorial said he was beaten by police officers for this small act of remembrance.

As thousands of Russians across the country tried to express their grief for Mr Navalny, who died on Friday in a remote penal colony in the Arctic, Russian police officers cracked down, temporarily detaining hundreds and jailing more than two dozen people .

Until Mr. Navalny's death at the age of 47, many observers believed the Kremlin would limit repression until after the presidential election in mid-March, when President Vladimir V. Putin is all but assured of a fifth term in office. But a lot now fear that the arrests portend a broader crackdown.

“Those who detain people are afraid of any opinion that is not related to propaganda, to the pervasive ideology,” said 31-year-old Lena, who applied a sticker to the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to the victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. . “Don't give up,” read the sticker – part of a message Mr Navalny once recorded in the event of his death.

Someone else placed a copy of Franz Kafka's “The Trial” on the pediment, while others hung chains of paper cranes, candles and a photo of Mr Navalny with fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015.

Lena, who gave only her first name for fear of reprisals, began to cry. “They are afraid of Navalny in prison,” she said, “they are afraid of the dead Navalny, they are afraid of the people who bring flowers to the stone here.”

She said: “That's why it's important to keep doing what we're doing, what this man did.”

At least 366 people have been detained in 39 cities across Russia since Mr. Navalny was declared dead, with 31 spending up to 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info, a Russia-based human rights organization that tracks arrests. . The rest were released after being held for a few hours. About half of those arrested were in St. Petersburg, said Dmitry Anisimov, the group's press officer.

In Samara, Russia's ninth-largest city by population, those who remembered Mr. Navalny had to have their passports photographed before being allowed to place their flowers in the snow, according to Caution, News, an independent outlet run by a Russian. socialite.

Officials have not released Mr. Navalny's body to his family — the official cause of death remains unclear — and no funeral plans have been announced.

“Grief is a collective action, and any collective action is by definition political,” says Grigory Yudin, a Russian sociologist and researcher at Princeton University. “If a collective activity is not ordered, it is in principle prohibited in Russia.”

In Surgut, a town in Western Siberia's Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region, Bakyt Karybaev said he was beaten during a five-hour detention after laying flowers at an impromptu memorial for Mr Navalny. He told The New York Times in a telephone interview that officers hit him on the head with their palms, put a gun to his head and forced him to lie on the ground with his arms outstretched.

“They told me I was a fascist because I support the fascist Navalny,” Mr Karybaev said. “Then they told me to confess the real reason I wanted to lay flowers. They asked if I knew who the monument was dedicated to. I told them it was for those who were oppressed in the Soviet Union.”

Mr Karybaev was released after signing a warning in which he acknowledged that he would face a criminal investigation if he did something similar again. He said he was now taking sedatives to try to calm down.

In Moscow, two men were arrested on a bridge near the Kremlin, where activists have maintained a memorial since 2015 to Mr Nemtsov, the opposition politician who was killed that year. According to OVD-Info, the two men, Boris Kazadayev and Ilya Povyshev, were interrogated by police, who arrested them after finding a photo of Mr Navalny in a backpack belonging to one of the men.

And in St. Petersburg, a bishop who planned to offer a public prayer for the dead in honor of Mr. Navalny was arrested on Saturday as he left his home and then hospitalized after suffering a stroke in police custody. The bishop, Grigori Mikhnov-Vaitenko, planned to perform the prayer near the city's Solovetsky Stone, a monument similar to the one in Moscow.

Although protests are effectively banned in modern-day Russia, religious leaders are legally allowed to hold services in public without prior permission. Bishop Mikhnov-Vaitenko, a member of the Apostolic Orthodox Church, had published his intention to hold the prayer the day before on his Facebook page and his Telegram channel, which has more than 5,000 followers.

His next post appeared to be a selfie that looked like a mugshot at the police station where he was being held. He was charged with organizing a public meeting that constituted a “breach of public order,” which carries a possible prison sentence of up to 15 days.

Late on Saturday, an opposition politician, Lev Shlosberg, reported that the bishop had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke.

Bishop Mikhnov-Vaitenko, a prominent human rights activist, cut ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in 2014 after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fueled a proxy war in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church, the country's largest religious community, has supported the Kremlin and given its imprimatur to the invasion of Ukraine. On Saturday, the St. Petersburg branch called on the public to ignore the bishop's calls for public action a post on Telegram.

After his detention, the prayer service was led by a colleague from the Apostolic Orthodox Church. Video of the event, several dozen people can be seen gathering around the Solovetsky Stone, which was filled with flowers. After the service ended, 10 people were arrested, according to MR 7. News, a news channel in St. Petersburg.

The severity of the crackdown drew condemnation from Mr Shlosberg, a veteran Russian opposition politician from the western region of Pskov.

“Is the inability to hold a legal and peaceful religious ceremony a serious or not serious enough consequence for society?” He wrote on Telegram, in which he says so Russians were denied the rights to which they are entitled under the Constitution.

“Apparently the authorities themselves do not understand where the boundaries of this lawlessness lie,” Mr Shlosberg said. “The intention to suppress every social manifestation, including even natural sadness, leads our country not only to the abyss of lawlessness (there are no more rights), but also to the abyss of misanthropy.”

While all this was happening, state media were regularly broadcasting entertainment shows. News broadcasts showed reports from the Russian front at Avdiivka, the Ukrainian city that fell to occupying Russian forces on Friday, along with figure skaters at the All-Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow. And on Rossiya 1, the country's flagship show, “News of the Week,” spent much of its time rehashing Tucker Carlson's interview with Mr. Putin, and the American media personality's praise for the public train system in Moscow.

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London.