A bishop who planned a public prayer for the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was detained as he left his house. Two men were arrested for having a photograph of Mr. Navalny in a backpack. Another man who lay flowers at a memorial said he was beaten by police officers for the small act of remembrance.
As thousands of Russians across the country tried to give voice to their grief for Mr. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, Russian police officers cracked down, temporarily detaining hundreds and placing more than two dozen in jail.
Until Mr. Navalny’s death at the age of 47, many observers had believed that the Kremlin would limit repression until after presidential elections in mid-March, when President Vladimir V. Putin is all but assured a fifth term. But many now fear that the arrests portend a broader crackdown.
“Those who are detaining people are afraid of any opinion that isn’t connected to propaganda, to the pervading ideology,” said Lena, 31, who brought a sticker to the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. “Don’t give up,” read the sticker — part of a message Mr. Navalny once recorded in case of his death.
Someone else placed a copy of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” at the pediment, while others hung chains of paper cranes, candles, and a photo of Mr. Navalny smiling with fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015 in the shadow of the Kremlin.
Lena, who gave only her first name for fear of reprisal, started to cry. “They are scared of Navalny in jail,” she said, “they are scared of dead Navalny, they are scared of the people who bring flowers here to the stone.”
She said: “That’s why it is important to continue doing what we are doing, what this man did.”
At least 366 people have been detained in 39 cities across Russia since Mr. Navalny was pronounced dead, with 31 of them ordered to spend up to 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info, a Russian-based human rights group that tracks arrests. The rest were released after being held for a few hours. About half of those detained were in St. Petersburg, said Dmitri Anisimov, the group’s press secretary.
In Samara, Russia’s ninth-largest city by population, those who came to remember Mr. Navalny were required 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,” said Grigory Yudin, a Russian sociologist and research scholar at Princeton University. “In Russia, if a collective activity is not ordered, it is basically prohibited.”
In Surgut, a city in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region in Western Siberia, Bakyt Karypbaev 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 phone interview that officers hit him on his head with their palms, put a gun to his head and forced him to lie on the floor with his arms outstretched.
“They told me I was a fascist because I support the fascist Navalny,” Mr. Karypbaev said. “Then they told me to confess the true reason that I wanted to lay flowers. They asked if I knew to whom the monument was dedicated. I told them it was to those repressed in the Soviet Union.”
Mr. Karypbaev was released after signing a warning acknowledging that he would face a criminal inquiry if he did something similar again. He said he was now taking sedatives to try and calm down.
In Moscow, two men were detained on a bridge near the Kremlin where since 2015 activists have maintained a memorial to Mr. Nemtsov, the opposition politician, who was assassinated…
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