For the second day in a row, mourners walked purposefully along Moscow’s snow-heaped Garden Ring on Saturday carrying bouquets to lay at one of the improvised memorials to Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who perished in a prison colony the day before.
The flowers, wrapped in paper to shield them from the icy wind, were not only a symbol of mourning. They also served as a form of protest in a country where even the mildest dissent can risk detention. And the people who laid bouquets at the Wall of Grief, a monument to the victims of political persecution during the Stalin era, shared the conviction that the Russian state was behind Mr. Navalny’s death.
“He didn’t die, he was killed,” said Alla, 75, a pensioner who declined to give her last name because of possible repercussions.
“Theoretically, we knew that they wanted to destroy him,” said her friend Elena, 77, whose arm was interlaced with Alla’s. “But when it happened it was such a shock, the senseless brutality of it, just senseless.” She found out what had happened when her daughter and granddaughter called her in tears to share the news.
Both women expressed pride that people were showing up to express their disagreement with the state, despite the sweeping crackdown on dissent since Russian President Vladimir V. Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost two years ago.
In announcing Mr. Navalny’s death on Friday, Russia’s prison service said that he felt suddenly unwell during a walk and that the causes were “being determined.” A lawyer for Mr. Navalny said an “additional histology” had been performed on the body to determine the cause of his death, and that its results should be ready next week.
Some who showed up at the memorial gatherings paid the price. At least 400 people have been detained across Russia since Mr. Navalny’s death was announced on Friday, according to the human rights group OVD-Info. Among them was a priest, Father Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko, who had been scheduled to hold a memorial service for Mr. Navalny in St. Petersburg.
It is the most significant spate of arrests since protests against a general mobilization for the war in Ukraine in Sept. 2022.
“They try to scare us so much that it is not possible to live,” said Elena, who added that she worried for the fate of hundreds of other political prisoners in Russia.
Fear prevented Andrei, a 17-year-old in 11th grade, from buying flowers, but he wanted to come and see what was happening. He bristled when one passerby mocked the mourners and questioned Mr. Navalny’s legacy.
“What did he do for our country that deserves our prayers or mourning?” said Sergei, a pensioner who also provided just his first name.
“What about smart voting?” ventured Andrei, referring to a system pioneered in 2018 by Mr. Navalny’s team that encouraged voters to unite around one opposition candidate, hoping to outpoll Putin loyalists.
“He was an empty person, just a puppet of the West,” Sergei responded.
As they spoke, dozens of police observed and interacted with people coming to the complex, and another group of riot police in position near paddy wagons looked on half a block away. The Wall of Grief, in central Moscow, is on Sakharov Avenue, named after Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose activism was punished with years of internal exile in Gorky, today known as Nizhny Novgorod.
The government has used the site to contain protest movements by making it the only permitted venue whenever public pressure for a march has forced a response. Mr. Navalny frequently addressed demonstrations there.
For Olya, 39, the heaps of flowers and candles served as a rare but valuable reminder that she is not alone in wanting a democratic, free Russia without war.
“At a time like this it is so important to see that there are people who think like I do,” she said, as she brought roses to the Wall of Grief. Earlier, she said she had laid…
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