Two or three hours after Alexei Navalny’s death was announced, the monument on Lubyanka Square commemorating political prisoners of Stalin turned into an improvised memorial and was literally drowning in flowers, and it stayed thus for the following week. “When I reached to put my carnations there,” my friend D. told me, “I had to stand on my toes.”
Here, near this particular monument in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service is where, until the coronavirus restrictions and then the invasion of Ukraine, we would gather every year and recite the endless list of names of gulag prisoners. Now, all such gatherings are strictly prohibited.
And this time we were back for the man many of us knew in person, followed on Twitter, agreed and had arguments with, voted or volunteered for, wrote letters to while he was in prison on trumped-up charges.
Everything was red and blue because of the insistent police lights reflected in snow. “Keep moving, there’s nothing to stay here for,” policemen shouted into their megaphones with evident irritation in their voices. It was freezing out there, and the cops probably hated standing in the cold as much as we needed it—being together, paying our respects, sharing our despair, mourning for our collective past and all the hopes buried in it.
“When I saw the news, I was at work,” my friend I. told me. “I could not discuss it with my colleagues—not all of them can be trusted. I had to suppress my tears.” This is a common motif in people’s stories about this grief: you have to hide it from your colleagues, neighbors, often even from your own family.
I remember the evenings of December 2011, when the opposition rallies for fair elections first gathered thousands of people in large cities, and Navalny was one of the most charismatic speakers there. I was 15 then; I watched it all in live streams from my hometown between homework assignments, and that was the introduction to politics for me and many from my generation.
The cops probably hated standing there in the cold as much as we needed it—being together, paying our respects, sharing our despair, mourning for our collective past and all the hopes buried in it.
I became a fangirl. I remember how, 17 and too young to vote, I spent my first-ever day in Moscow distributing leaflets for Navalny’s Moscow-mayor campaign. I knew about Navalny’s nationalist views—but I also witnessed his ability to reflect, to adapt, to switch to a more openly democratic agenda for the sake of the people he so passionately cared for.
I remember seeing Navalny at rallies in the name of Boris Nemtsov, another opposition leader, murdered by President Vladimir Putin’s regime in 2015. I remember volunteering for Navalny’s campaign in the 2018 presidential election, from which he was eventually banned. I remember holding my fingers crossed after his attempted murder in the summer of 2020. Later, when Navalny, barely recovered, investigated his own attempted assassination and revealed how Putin’s men hid Novichok in his underwear, I remember laughing hard at the goofy comedy of our authorities barely hiding their crimes.
I remember January 2021, when thousands of people again were marching on Moscow streets after Navalny’s arrest. It is not that everybody in the opposition liked him; many didn’t, and I myself had several swings of attitude during those years. But he was always there for us, and his perseverance, his tirelessness, his humor and hope, seemed to sustain millions of people in Russia and abroad.
When he was killed, we desperately needed to come together, but the government’s new set of repressive laws forces Putin’s opponents to speak in secure places and sotto voce—at the same time, it seems that the grief and anger spilled over everywhere.
There is a new wave of dark but inspiring anonymous Internet satires and snowdrifts in the streets where the name “Navalny” is spelled by who knows whom. We cannot hide from the emotion that has silently flooded our country with tears, flowers, and a new willingness to stay strong like the man we are now deprived of.
“When I saw the news, I was at work,” my friend I. told me. “I could not discuss it with my colleagues—not all of them can be trusted. I had to suppress my tears.”
In the days after his death, the authorities refused to release Navalny’s body, not even after his mother traveled to the penal colony where he died. According to Lyudmila Navalnaya, the authorities pressured her to agree to a “secret” burial by threatening that something would “happen” to the body if she didn’t agree, and told her, “Time is not on your side; corpses decompose.” On Saturday, a Navalny spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said that the opposition leader’s body had been returned to his mother, but it was unclear whether the family would be allowed to give him a public burial. “The funeral is yet to take place,” Yarmysh wrote on X. “We don’t know whether the authorities will interfere with it being carried out in the way the family wants and as Alexei deserves.”
There is also still no coherent official version of the reason for Navalny’s death, although the police had assured Lyudmila Navalnaya that the legal paperwork was already filled out. Any independent investigation of the body seems out of the question. This secrecy raises all kinds of suspicions, including the fear that he was deliberately murdered and not just left to die.
Were Navalny alive, he would probably make a hilarious theatrical exposure of how the body of a dead convict somewhere in the Far North, still dangerous for the richest and most powerful people in the country, is held hostage by local institutions in a failed attempt to hush up the case. But without him and his usual grin there are only heartbreaking accounts of his mother seeking desperately to bury what is left of her son.
Navalny seemed indestructible, and yet, as resilient as he was, he could not fight the vast army of his enemies forever, always miraculously surviving. Millions of people in Russia and abroad long to—and will not ever—hear again his famous catchphrase: “Hi, it’s Navalny.”
Any quick retribution for Putin and his allies does not seem possible now, as we are still living the nightmare of dictatorship and a dreadful colonialist war happening on our behalf. All options for peaceful public protest have long been suppressed. As for not-so-peaceful options for protest—currently, nobody seems to possess enough power and means to organize anything that could be effective and not even worse than the status quo.
But there is also a sensation that the authorities have, with their own hands, created a powerful image of an unlawfully tortured charismatic martyr that is going to haunt them and inspire their opponents for many years to come. Yulia Navalnaya’s announcement of her commitment to her late husband’s cause proves that nothing has really ended for us.
Katya V. is a poet, a feminist, and a tutor of Russian and English