After days of searching, the mother of the Russian opposition politician was able to see his body. The authorities will decide how he will be buried.
The mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny outside the Charp city prison on February 20, 2024. Photo: Team Navalny/ap
MOSCOW taz | He spent days driving from place to place in the frigid northwest of Siberia, from the penal colony to the clinic to the morgue. Lyudmila Navalnaya initially did not find her son, Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who died suddenly in Russia's “reform colony number 3” behind the Arctic Circle. She was not allowed to find him.
On Thursday night everything happened apparently very quickly: “I was secretly taken to the morgue, where they showed me Alexei,” he said later in a minute and a half long video message. However, the regime continues to enact the vile drama surrounding the body of the man who survived a poisoning attack by the Russian secret services three years ago and whose name Russian President Vladimir Putin never mentions.
“I signed the death certificate saying that Alexei died of natural causes. According to the law, they should have given the body to me immediately. But they haven't done it yet.” Instead, they threatened her, Lyudmila Navalnaya said. “Time is against you,” an investigator told him, as the body was decomposing. They are blackmailing her: if she does not accept the authorities' conditions, “they will do something with my son's body.”
He should agree to a secret burial for his son, it was claimed on Thursday. “They want to take me to the edge of a cemetery, near a fresh grave, and tell me: 'Your son rests here.' I don’t agree with this,” she said in the video.
“Putin, you are destroying traditional values”
According to the Russian Orthodox faith, and Navalny was a deeply religious person, it is customary to bury the dead after three days. But authorities rejected the family's requests. Nor do they hear the cries for help from Russian opposition activists, singers, actors, dancers and journalists to give the dead son to his mother.
“Traditional values? “You, Putin, are destroying these traditional values that you praise so much,” said singer Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, once sentenced to several years in prison after her punk prayer with the band “Pussy Riot” in the most of Russia, in a video message. The regime mocks and humiliates the bereaved, even after Navalny's death, something that can be seen in almost all of these requests.
Meanwhile, Putin is completely calm and congratulated the “fighters of the special military operation” on Friday. “They are true folk heroes. The true love of our people belongs to them,” he stated in a televised message. Russia celebrates “Defender of the Fatherland Day” on February 23. It's a day off from work. In kindergarten, girls built tanks out of matchboxes for the children in their group, and parents received self-painted portraits of their children. . This Soviet tradition of worshiping the army never disappeared from Russia.
The authorities, who always seem strong and confident of victory, apparently tremble before Navalny's funeral. “You say this openly: we are afraid that the morgue will be attacked. “That's why everything has to happen in secret,” Ivan Zhdanov, head of Navalny's FBK anti-corruption foundation, said in a YouTube broadcast.
It is still unclear when, how and where Navalny will be buried.