Thousands of mourners gathered in Moscow on Friday for the funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, despite an ominous warning from the Kremlin that anyone participating in unsanctioned gatherings could face arrest.
Thousands of mourners gathered in Moscow on Friday for the funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, despite an ominous warning from the Kremlin that anyone participating in unsanctioned gatherings could face arrest.
Crowds of people, many clutching red carnations, gathered amid a heavy police presence to pay their respects to the Kremlin foe, with some chanting “Putin is a killer” and “you weren’t afraid, we aren’t afraid.”
More than 400 people have been detained in dozens of cities across Russia for participating in memorials in the two weeks since Navalny’s sudden and still unexplained death in a Russian penal colony in the Arctic Circle, according to OVD-Info, which monitors politically motivated arrests in Russia. At least 115 people were detained on Friday, according to the group.
Navalny, who was 47 years old, was buried in Borisovo cemetery in his childhood neighborhood in southeast Moscow. The casket of the Putin critic, who was known for his irreverent sense of humor, was lowered into the ground to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” followed by the theme tune from his favorite film, Terminator 2.
Navalny’s sudden death has fueled concerns about the well-being of hundreds of other prisoners in Russia.
“If they could kill Navalny, they could kill anybody else,” said Grigory Vaypan, a senior lawyer at Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group.
There are currently 679 people serving sentences on politically motivated charges, according to Memorial, although the actual number is likely much higher, Vaypan said.
“This number is the absolute minimum. It’s the most conservative assessment that we can get,” he said.
Despite the international outcry over Navalny’s death, Moscow’s crackdown on dissent shows little sign of abating.
On Feb. 27, Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial, was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine. Two days later, a court in Sverdlovsk rejected the appeal of a Russian American, Ksenia Karelina, who was detained on treason charges earlier this year for donating just over $50 to a Ukrainian charity.
The Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent has gathered pace throughout Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 24 years in power, escalating dramatically in the wake of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The number of people in prison on politically motivated charges has increased 15-fold over the past decade, Vaypan said, with arrests surging further still since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In 2022, more than 21,000 people were penalized for publicly opposing the war and faced detention and heavy fines, according to Amnesty International.
Shortly after the invasion, Putin signed a new law that prohibits the “discreditation” of the Russian Armed Forces and the dissemination of so-called fake news about the country’s military. The law has been used widely to target critics of the war.
Last year, a court in Moscow sentenced 63-year-old railway worker Mikhail Simonov to seven years in prison for making anti-war statements on the Russian social media platform VKontakte. “While killing children and women, we sing songs on Channel One [Russian state TV],” Simonov wrote. “We, Russia, have become godless. Forgive us, Lord,” Simonov wrote in a post.
“The approach is to target one person to create a chilling effect for another 1,000 or 10,000 people,” Vaypan said, of the haphazard way the law has been applied. “No one ever knows who is going to be targeted for what and who is going to be let off the hook,” he said.
The length of sentences has also increased dramatically in recent years. In 2023, dissident and Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for condemning the war in Ukraine. Natalia Arno, president of the Free Russia Foundation, described the sentence as reminiscent of those handed down to dissidents in the Stalin era.
With Navalny dead, Kara-Murza, a dual British-Russian citizen, is now the most prominent Kremlin critic imprisoned in Russia. “We understand that Kara-Murza is next, and he is very high on Putin’s target list,” said Arno, a friend of the jailed Putin foe.
Kara-Murza has survived two near-fatal poisoning attempts that have left him with lingering health issues and amplified concerns about his well-being in the Russian prison system, where health care is notoriously poor.
Conditions in Russian prisons are equally grim. A 2021 State Department report described the country’s detention centers and penal colonies as “often harsh and life threatening,” noting that food and sanitation standards were low while overcrowding and abuse were rife.
A striking number of Russia’s political prisoners have been convicted on religious grounds. Their cases receive significantly less attention both within Russia and abroad. Almost two-thirds of the people considered political prisoners by Memorial have been persecuted because of their religious beliefs.
Many are adherents of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist political organization that Russia deemed a terror group in 2003.
As with other politically motivated cases, Hizb ut-Tahrir followers were previously sentenced to two- to three-year prison terms, said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center, a Moscow-based think tank that studies nationalism and racism, but in recent years they have been handed down sentences of up to 24 years.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, which Russia labeled an extremist group in 2017, have also borne the brunt of an inexplicable and punishing crackdown.
Since 2017, there have been over 2,000 raids on Jehovah’s Witnesses, with 794 people facing charges, according to Jarrod Lopes, a spokesperson for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States. Many of those facing charges are older adults; the trial of the oldest, 85-year-old Yuriy Yuskov, began in January.
On Thursday, a 52-year-old man in the Russian city of Tolyatti, Aleksandr Chagan, was handed an eight-year sentence for his membership in the church.
“We’ve noticed that the Russian authorities haven’t slowed down in religious persecutions. If anything, lately, things have continued to escalate,” Lopes said.
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