Post by pieter on Mar 1, 2024 14:00:49 GMT -7
NOS News•
today, 9:11 PM
Posthumously, Navalny organizes the largest political demonstration in Russia in years
The Kremlin initially did not want to release the body of opposition politician Navalny, and certainly not want a public funeral. Yet Navalny's funeral today became the largest political event in Russia in years, with an unexpected number of Russians coming to pay their last respects. Hours in advance they lined up for the funeral of the man who posed the greatest threat to President Putin's omnipotence in the past decade.
Most of those thousands of visitors were unable to attend the funeral ceremony in the church itself. They walked in a procession from the church to the cemetery in southern Moscow, about 2.5 kilometers away. Along the way, participants shouted slogans such as "against the war", "Russia without Putin" and "Putin murderer". The route was closed off with crush barriers; people could not choose their own route. There were police officers everywhere along the side, but they did not intervene.
"The large turnout underlines the fact that there is still a lot of resistance to Putin," says historian and Russia expert Artemy Kalinovsky of the University of Amsterdam. "Several thousand visitors are of course not that many people, given the enormous size of Russia. But we no longer live in 2012 or even 2022, when demonstrating was easier than it is now. In recent years, Russians have been arrested and even jailed for much smaller offenses than shouting slogans."
This is what the funeral in Moscow looked like today:
According to the Dutch journalist, historian and Russia expert Hubert Smeets of knowledge platform Raam op Rusland (View on Russia), it is thanks to Navalny's mother Lyudmila that there was a public ceremony at all today. "She kept her leg stiff." She complained in recent weeks of being pressured to accept a secret ceremony, only for intimates, or an anonymous burial in a mass grave in the penal colony.
"She then made that intimidation public," Smeets outlines. "The authorities must then have thought: we are not going to take this risk. Giving a final greeting to a dead person is extremely important according to Christian morality in Russia. If the authorities had refused to do that, they would probably have suffered more than they do today had."
Once authorities gave in to Navalny's mother's demand to release his body, they also had to accept that it would become a kind of demonstration, Kalinovsky says. "What helped Navalny's supporters with this is that the funeral was also a Christian ceremony. It will look very bad if you take tough action against that. I am convinced that the police have been instructed to restrain themselves today."
As far as we know, no one was arrested around Navalny's funeral in Moscow. Elsewhere in Russia, at least 67 people were arrested, human rights organization OVD-Info reports. These would have mainly been people who wanted to lay flowers at monuments to the victims of Soviet repression.
'No hope for opposition'
The fact that the police did not intervene today around the funeral does not mean that participants do not have to worry about the consequences, says Smeets. "It is very conceivable that participants will be traced via video images and that they will be visited at home by the police."
The large turnout today also does not mean that serious opposition to Putin is still possible at this time. “They have no hope of achieving anything in the upcoming presidential elections,” Kalinovsky estimates. Smeets also says that the large turnout today "doesn't say much about the opposition as an organized movement". "There isn't one."
But according to both experts, today's turnout says something about the secretive mood in Russia. Kalinovsky: "It is good to be reminded once again that you should not tar all Russians with the same brush: they are not either fully supporters of Putin and his war or opponents."
Smeets adds: "According to many opinion polls, the Russians are not very much in favor of the war. They are not against it either, but they look away. A small group of Russians is openly against the war, but they are also looking forward to it. "The mood that the war must end is increasing. Many people have used this ceremony to express this indirectly."