Marina, a Moscow lawyer, decided to stay home when the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was buried last Friday. She had expected a big crowd and widespread arrests at the Borisovsky Cemetery, given Russia’s current climate of repression, and thought it would be better to pay her respects another day.
She wasn’t alone in that thought. When she came to lay flowers on Sunday, she had to wait in line for up to 40 minutes, Marina said in a phone interview from Moscow. (Like others, she asked that her last name be withheld for fear of retribution.)
After Mr. Navalny’s funeral — when thousands of mourners had waited outside the church and marched across the Moskva River to the cemetery where he was interred — it was widely expected that the crowds would thin out. Presumably, that was the hope inside the Kremlin. In the days since, however, the gravesite has become a place of pilgrimage for those yearning for his vision of “the beautiful Russia of the future” to become a reality.
Yet, with Mr. Navalny’s death, at 47, in one of Russia’s harshest and most remote penal colonies, that dream now seems distant to Marina and many others.
“I didn’t think that he would be killed in prison,” she said. “I thought he would actually get out, and it would be a turning point, and everything would change. I haven’t fully processed Navalny’s death. For now, I don’t know, I don’t have any vision of the future.”
That is not only because he died, she added, “but because forces of evil are closing in,” a reference to Russia’s increasingly totalitarian bent.
Marina and many others said just making the trip to the suburban Borisovo neighborhood where Mr. Navalny is buried was a healing experience. The gravesite has been heaped so high with flowers that it is often impossible to see the wooden cross at its head.
The line seemed enormous when Marina arrived on a bus full of people wielding bouquets, she recalled, but was twice as long as she left. Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet, calculated that approximately 27,000 people used the nearest metro station on Friday, Saturday and Sunday to visit Mr. Navalny’s grave.
“I felt so much better when I saw how many people share the same values with me,” said Yulia, 47, who visited the grave on Saturday. “After Aleksei’s funeral, I felt better emotionally, as if a weight had been lifted, because I saw that all the propaganda, all these wretched clowns on television, has no influence on the majority of people”
Both women said that the crowd at the cemetery appeared to comprise people of varied ages and backgrounds. Marina said she noticed little notes left on the grave by people from Russian cities beyond Moscow.
Many of the people attending the funeral on Friday had been prepared for the possibility of being detained. Mass arrests did not materialize, but the authorities appeared to be using videos and photographs, from various sources, possibly to detain people later on.
That was no idle threat. Since the funeral, reports have emerged of people who appeared in footage of the event being visited by law enforcement at home and being detained. That is in addition to at least 400 people detained at impromptu memorials in the two weeks between Mr. Navalny’s death and the funeral. The news outlet OVD-Info reported that another 113 people in 19 cities across Russia were detained on Friday for openly mourning Mr. Navalny.
“They want to kill the memory of Aleksei, they want to kill his ideas, but they can’t do it, because he put his ideas in peoples’ hearts and minds a long time ago,” said Nikolai Lyaskin, a politician who spent years working with Mr. Navalny.
“Aleksei has always been, seemed and perceived as someone unbreakable, unshakable,” he said. “He was like a lighthouse pointing the way forward, that things are bad but we must fight. Now the lighthouse has been removed, and we have to somehow sail by ourselves.”
In January 2022, Mr. Navalny and seven of his associates were added to the Russian government’s official list of “terrorists and extremists,” putting them on the same legal footing as the Taliban, the Islamic State and domestic far-right nationalist groups. (The Taliban can visit Russia freely, but Mr. Navalny’s associates fled the country to avoid arrest.) The year before, his organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund, was added to the list, making it illegal for anyone associated with it to run for public office and criminalizing affiliation with the group.
That so many people continue to flock to the cemetery to mourn someone considered a “terrorist and extremist” is “an extraordinary event,” a Russian political scientist, Ekaterina Schulmann, said Tuesday on her YouTube channel.
“This is happening in Moscow, in the year 2024, after two years of war and fairly massive emigration, precisely by those people who supported Aleksei Navalny or could support him,” she said.
Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who is also living outside Russia, released a video on Wednesday thanking those who went to a gravesite she cannot visit.
“Looking at you, I am convinced that everything is not in vain,” she said. “These shots are filled not only with sorrow and grief, but also with hope. Aleksei dreamed of a beautiful Russia of the future. And you are Russia. These days I saw a lot of warmth, kindness and unity. And this is exactly what distinguishes us from the people sitting in the Kremlin.”
In the video, she urged Russians to heed Mr. Navalny’s call, from the prison where he later died, to vote against Vladimir V. Putin in presidential elections at noon on March 17 in a show of political unity.
But polling by the independent Levada Center is sobering. Only one in 10 respondents following his death spoke approvingly of his activities. About 20 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of people who were trying to honor Mr. Navalny’s memory, while a similar amount had a negative attitude. “The majority,” wrote the pollsters, “is indifferent.”
For people like Shura Burtin, an independent journalist, Mr. Navalny’s death and its aftermath have led to a sense of despair.
“Hoping that there will be something normal with Russia in the foreseeable future is dangerous,” Mr. Burtin wrote in Meduza, an independent news outlet based in Latvia.
“I think it’s important to feel our weakness,” he said. “It is clear to see that we have no future and that we are very weak. To see how disconnected we are, how bad we are at helping each other.”
Unlike Marina and Yulia, Mr. Burtin is in exile outside Russia. But he shared the urgent desire to surround himself with like-minded people after Mr. Navalny’s death.
“When I found out about Navalny, I wanted to call everyone. For now, this is the only thing that comes to mind — to be closer to each other,” he wrote. “I think it’s time to go into emergency mode and try to behave differently.”
Marina said she wants to visit the grave again soon, perhaps when fewer people are there, so that she could say a proper goodbye without being pushed to move on.
