Alexei Navalny was buried today at Borisovskoye Cemetery, Moscow. Up to ten thousand people marked the occasion. Earlier, at his memorial service, his mother and father sat to the left of his open casket in The Church of the Icon of Our Lady Quench My Sorrows. Some foreign diplomats were at the funeral. However, there were no representatives of The Russian State which is not very surprising as it was The Russian State, under the instructions of Putin, that killed Alexei Navalny.
Three people who loved him deeply could only be there in spirit - not in person - his wife Yulia and his children Darya and Zakhar. This speaks volumes about the fearsome nature of The Russian State - having to choose to stay away from your husband or your father's funeral for fear of arrest.
In the circumstances, with so much smothering of information and so many citizens in fear of the autocratic government that rules them, a turn-out of ten thousand mourners and supporters was, in my view, pretty good. They will have all been photographed and identified by agents of The Russian State and some will suffer in the months that follow. It might have been a good time to wear Navalny masks.
After all, there is a sense in which they are all Alexei Navalny - desperate for a better future, a free Russia devoid of their dangerous megalomaniacal leader. There was some brave chanting before the crowd dispersed. Even if Navalny's people had had an opportunity to fully examine his body, I suspect they would have found no trace of the wicked Kremlin-endorsed practices that killed him.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/l6IKuU2