The funeral of a Russian dissident always reflects the political moment. In freer times, the body may lie in state as thousands of supporters file past; in darker days, the last rites can be confined to a prison graveyard. With all eyes on Alexei Navalny’s burial, set for Friday, it will show just how far into the past Russia has slid under Vladimir Putin.
It was still a dark period in 1986 when Anatoly Marchenko, the last political prisoner before Navalny to die behind bars, was laid to rest. He died after a 117-day hunger strike to demand the release of all the country’s political prisoners. Navalny said he considered Marchenko to be his hero.
“Tolya [Marchenko] was lying in a simple wooden coffin, covered with a sheet,” wrote Flora Litvinova, a friend who attended the burial. “They revealed his face: it was beautiful, enlightened. Later, when I looked closely, I saw how his cheeks had sunken in, his neck wrinkled, his skin sagged with folds. But that was later.”
Marchenko’s family had scrambled to arrange the funeral with the Soviet authorities after his death in a prison hospital. The state demanded he be buried in Chistopol, in Tatarstan far from Moscow, where he had been jailed for “anti-Soviet agitation”. The graveyard “was deserted, a strong wind was blowing, and there was no one around except us and the convoy”, wrote his wife, the dissident Larisa Bogoraz. The family put real and artificial flowers, as well as apples and crumbled bread on the grave.
“I was 13 during my dad’s funeral and of course it was a sad day,” Pavel Marchenko, the dissident’s son, told the Guardian. “Giving back the body was never an issue but the authorities didn’t want to bring it to Moscow. They wanted to have control over everything, choose the grave themselves, and bury him themselves. I am not sure what they were afraid of. The authorities also seemed to be in a rush to bury him.”
As Russia prepares for Navalny’s funeral on Friday, his family’s every step has been met with obstruction. His mother was forced to battle for days to retrieve his body. Investigators tried to blackmail her into holding a quiet funeral in the remote Arctic region where he had died, similar to Marchenko’s. Russian police will record the passports of mourners who come to the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God, in a quiet residential area of Moscow. Allies on Thursday said that attempts to hire a hearse to take Navalny’s body to his funeral had been thwarted by unknown individuals.
Navalny’s team have called for supporters from around the country to attend the funeral and “not to be afraid”. But arrests or clashes could take place.
“I think the situation is even worse now,” said Marchenko’s son. “The Soviet authorities at least needed to pretend to look humane, the current government doesn’t care at all. They don’t care about the optics. Both governments didn’t care about their own people, but back then, the Soviets wanted to look good in front of the west, they wanted to present an image of decency. Now they don’t care at all.”
Days after his arrest in 2021, Navalny said he was reading Marchenko’s My Testimony, describing life in a prison colony in the 1960s. The memoir was a sensation in the west because it described how the Gulag conditions of the Stalinist 1930s had remained after Stalin’s death. Navalny found that conditions had not changed very much: “On every page, I am amazed not even by how similar the systems are, but by the fact that they are the same system,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.
“What’s going on now with Navalny and his body is terrible, disgusting,” said Marchenko’s son. “I feel for his family. We know exactly what the Putin system really is.”
A celebration of Sakharov
Change came soon after Marchenko’s death, with Mikhail Gorbachev ordering a mass release of political prisoners in 1987. As Soviet Russia opened up during glasnost, the death of the dissident Andrei Sakharov became a moment for thousands of Soviet citizens and the leadership to recognise the contributions of a man called the “conscience of mankind”.
Just three years after Marchenko’s solitary burial, tens of thousands of Russians filed past the Academy of Sciences in Moscow to view Sakharov’s body. A Soviet nuclear physicist who had helped develop the hydrogen bomb, he later became a dissident campaigning against the testing and proliferation of nuclear weapons, then for human rights, and then against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for which he was exiled from Moscow to the city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod.
Gorbachev had allowed Sakharov to return to Moscow weeks after Marchenko’s death and two years after that stood in an icy December rain with mourners outside the Academy of Sciences. “Now it is clear that he deserved the Nobel prize,” he said, referring to the 1975 prize that Sakharov had been prevented from receiving.
“During Sakharov’s funeral, there was a feeling of hope,” recalled Irina Scherbakova, a Russian historian, author and a founding member of Memorial, who attended the funeral. “That his life and death weren’t for nothing, a feeling that he achieved a lot of things.”
The memorial was an opportunity for protest, with some holding banners demanding democratic elections and others hoisting the blue-red-white tricolour of tsarist Russia. Images of the procession were aired on state-run television.
“Hundreds of thousands of people turned up despite the cold,” said Scherbakova. “These were the people who would drive perestroika, who wanted change. Sadly, in the 90s many of these people were left behind, society became poor, egoistic and lost its way. In that sense, Sakharov’s funeral was also one of the last moments everyone came together for change.”
Nemtsov’s death and ‘despair’
Putin’s 25 years in power have been marked by a number of shocking killings, including the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and rights worker Nataliya Estemirova. But the 2015 assassination of Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister who had become a leading critic of Putin and his war in Ukraine, was an inflection point in Russia’s crackdown on the opposition, and a crime that has never been ultimately solved.
Thousands queued to view Nemtsov’s body, which was laid out in a coffin in the Sakharov Centre, a popular venue for opposition speakers, before being taken for burial at the Troyekurovskoy cemetery.
Among the guests attending the Nemtsov funeral were several senior officials from the so-called “liberal camp” of the government in a gesture of conciliation that feels unimaginable nine years later under a increasingly totalitarian regime.
Zhanna Nemtsova, his daughter, said at the time that his death was an “act of political violence” that she blamed on Russian state propaganda.
“For years, [state television channels] stoked hatred towards him and other opposition figures, casting them as ‘national traitors’,” she wrote in 2015. “Vladimir Putin’s information machine presents opposition activists as “aliens” and employs criminal propaganda techniques to sow hatred, which in turn spawns violence and terror. Its modus operandi? To dehumanise the target.”
Scherbakova said that Nemtsov’s funeral differed from Sakharov’s because of an added element: “despair”.
Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin walls in February 2015 just two days before he was due to hold a protest march co-organised with Navalny. A court later refused Navalny leave from a 15-day jail sentence to attend Nemtsov’s funeral. When he was released, Navalny said he would go home to shower and change and then planned to visit Nemtsov’s grave.
“There will be no let-up in our efforts, we will give up nothing. This act of terror has not achieved its goal in this sense,” Navalny said then. “I am not frightened and I am sure my associates are not frightened either.”
