Sorrow, arrests and chants of dissent as thousands gather for Navalny's funeral

Defying the Kremlin's warning of arrests, thousands of mourners gathered in Moscow yesterday to bid farewell to the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, two weeks after Vladimir Putin's most prominent critic died in an Arctic prison.

- Pjotr Sauer

Crowds of people chanted "Putin is a murderer" and "No to war" as they marched, escorted by a heavy police presence, to the Borisovsky cemetery, where Navalny's coffin was lowered into the ground to the strains of Frank Sinatra's My Way.

The public show of support turned Navalny's last journey into a rare display of dissent in Russia at a time of unprecedented repression.

Accompanied by loud applause and chants of "Navalny", the hearse carrying his coffin arrived at the Quench My Sorrows church in the Maryino district of Moscow, where the late politician lived before he was poisoned with the novichok nerve agent in 2020.

Navalny's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, who spent more than a week in Russia's Arctic north retrieving his body from the IK-3 prison, and his father, Anatoly, were part of the small group of people attending the church ceremony that preceded the burial.

Navalny's team published a photograph of the memorial service that showed Navalny's body in an open casket covered in flowers, with his parents sitting by his side.

"This is an image that should have never existed," a tearful Leonid Volkov, Navalny's longtime ally, said during a livestream of the funeral on Navalny's YouTube channel.

After the short religious procession, Navalny's coffin was driven to the Borisovsky cemetery and lowered into a freshly dug grave. Footage from the cemetery showed his mother kissing him goodbye for the last time before his face was covered in white cloth. The theme from Navalny's favourite film, Terminator 2, was played after his coffin was lowered into the ground.