Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said his team had struggled to find a funeral director in recent days. “Some funeral homes claimed they were fully booked, while others simply refused to do the funeral when they heard who it was. One funeral director now told us that they had all received a message from the government that it was forbidden to work with us.”
Even finding a room where everyone could gather or appointing a pastor for the ceremony was not easy. Because everyone is scared and threatened. But in the meantime everything has been arranged. Although the Kremlin can still throw a spanner in the works at the last minute.
The farewell ceremony will now take place on Friday at 2 p.m. (12 p.m. our time) in the Moscow district of Maryino, where Navalny used to live.
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© AFP
The service takes place in the Russian Orthodox Church, an imposing white building with five domes.
At such funeral services, led by an Orthodox priest and accompanied by a choir, people can usually walk past the open casket of the deceased to say goodbye. It is not yet clear whether this is the case as it has now been more than two weeks since Navalny died.
There are no condolence letters. There will only be room for invited guests in the church. In addition to his wife Yulia, the biggest absentees will also be his mother Lyudmila Navalnaya (69), says Russia correspondent Geert Groot Koerkamp. His mother was able to see her son’s body. But she lives abroad and traveling to Russia would involve too many risks.
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Navalny is buried at the Borisovskoye Cemetery. — © Reuters
“Navalny will be buried after the service at the Borisovskoye cemetery, which is located on the other side of the Moskva River in the south,” Yarmysh said.
The Russian authorities want to prevent Friday’s ceremony from degenerating into a mass demonstration at all costs. The security services will therefore be present en masse and immediately suppress any form of protest. And in Russia that can be taken literally.
On Wednesday, the widow of the opposition leader said in the European Parliament in Strasbourg that she could not guarantee that the funeral would be peaceful and that the police would not arrest those who came to say goodbye.
Putin’s speech
Navalny’s team had originally wanted to hold the funeral on February 29, a day earlier. But “it soon became clear that there was not a single person around that day who could dig a grave,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
He suggested that the reason for this was that Putin will make an important speech on the same day. “Of course, the Kremlin also knows that no one will care about Putin and his speech on the day of Navalny’s farewell,” Zhdanov wrote on X.
Death by natural causes
Alexei Navalny died on February 16 in a notorious penal colony in the Arctic. Officially he became unwell after a walk, but his supporters are convinced that he was poisoned on Putin’s orders because the Russian leader did not agree to Navalny’s release as part of a possible prisoner swap. But the Kremlin says it is not aware of such an exchange.
Navalny’s death certificate, according to supporters, states that he died of natural causes. This would mean that the autopsy and toxicological examination officially revealed nothing suspicious. “As if we expected something different,” says Kira Yarmysh.