MOSCOW.- Hundreds of people said goodbye to Alexei Navalny on Friday at a funeral held in Moscow under a heavy police presence, after a dispute with authorities over the delivery of his body following his still unexplained death in a penal colony in the Arctic.
According to his followers, several churches in Moscow refused to celebrate mass for the man who fought against official corruption and organized massive protests that identified him as the main political enemy of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. Many Western leaders blamed the Russian president for the death of his rival, an accusation rejected by the Kremlin.
Navalny’s team eventually gained permission into the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Relieve My Suffering, which on Friday was surrounded by crowd control barriers. Hours before the service, hundreds of people waited to enter the church under the watchful eye of the large police force.
Western diplomats and local politicians Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova could be seen in the long line. Both aspired to face Putin in the presidential elections that will take place in the middle of the month and oppose the war in Ukraine, but their candidacies were not approved.
After arriving in a hearse at the church, the coffin left the vehicle amid applause and chants of “Navalny! “Navalny!” Some shouted “You weren’t afraid, neither were we!”
A photo taken inside the temple showed an open coffin with Navalny’s body covered in white and red flowers, and his mother sitting next to it holding a candle.
The opponent’s father was also present, but it was not clear who else in his family attended.
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, gave a speech just two days ago before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Her daughter studies at Stanford University in the United States, and the whereabouts of her son are unknown.
All of Navalny’s closest collaborators have left Russia due to pressure and followed the funeral, which was broadcast live on his YouTube channel, from abroad.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov asked those who gathered in Moscow and elsewhere not to violate the law and noted that any “unauthorized (crowd) gatherings” constitute a violation.
The burial is scheduled to be at the nearby Borisovskoye cemetery, where there was also a heavy police presence.
The opponent’s mother spent eight days trying to get the authorities to hand over her son’s body after his death on February 16 in Penal Colony number 3 in Kharp, a town in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.
Even on Friday itself, the morgue where the body was found delayed its delivery, said Ivan Zhdanov, a close collaborator of Navalny and director of his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
At first, the authorities claimed that they could not hand over the body because they had to carry out post-mortem tests. Navalnaya, 69, asked the president through a video to return the mortal remains of her son so she could bury him with dignity.
At least one funeral director said he was “forbidden” to work with Navalny supporters, his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. The opposition’s team also had difficulty finding a hearse.
Russian authorities have not yet announced the cause of death of Navalny, who was 47 years old.
The opponent had been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face safe detention after recovering in Germany from an attack with a nerve agent for which he blamed the Kremlin.
Both its Anti-Corruption Foundation and its regional offices were designated “extremist organizations” by the government in 2021.
Source: With information from AP
