Russian Police Crack Down on Dissidents on Alexei Navalny’s Birthday

Russian police cracked down on dissidents who spent Tuesday honoring the memory of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who died under murky circumstances in a Siberian prison in February.

Tuesday would have been Navalny’s 48th birthday.

Police in Moscow raided a party on Tuesday hosted by Dawn, the party of aspiring presidential candidate Yekaterina Duntsova, because the attendees were watching a live broadcast of a memorial concert for Navalny in Berlin.

Duntsova tried to run for president in the March 2024 presidential election on a platform of building a more “humane” and “peaceful” Russia but her candidacy was rejected by the Russian Central Election Commission on various technicalities, including alleged spelling errors on her paperwork. When her appeal against this mercurial decision was rejected by the Russian Supreme Court, she vowed to establish her own party and “win the right to live without fear.”

The complaint that brought the police to the Navalny concert watch party was filed by a radical nationalist group called the Russian Liberation Movement (SERB). Thirty people at the watch party were detained, searched, and eventually released.

Another riot police squad in Moscow descended upon a man named Vladislav Malakhov, who was toting a sign that read “Putin Belongs in Prison” as he marched around a monument to the victims of Soviet political repression.

Malakhov said the police beat him, kicked him, and threatened to send him to the front lines in Ukraine. The police then forced him to record a video that said he had no complaints with their behavior. 

Malakhov was treated for a concussion at the scene and charged with disobeying security forces and violating the rules for public events — rules that have been tightened to an outrageous degree by strongman Vladimir Putin to prevent public expressions of discontent with his war in Ukraine.

Two women were detained at the Borisov cemetery in Moscow, where Navalny is buried, as they tried to pay their respects to the fallen opposition leader. The police claimed one of the subjects was displaying some sort of “extremist symbolism,” but eyewitnesses said they saw nothing of the kind. The second woman was detained when she asked the police to stop harassing the first woman.

Something similar happened in Novosibirsk, Siberia, on the same day, when two women were detained for attempting to lay flowers at a monument to victims of political repression. 

A group of mourners did manage to place flowers around Navalny’s grave on Tuesday, along with a banner reading “Happy Birthday, Hero!” and photos of Navalny embracing his wife, Yulia Navalnaya.

Navalnaya, who took up the torch of her husband’s activism after his death, attended a memorial service in Berlin on Tuesday in the company of several Navalny associates, including his former press secretary Kira Yarmysh and chief of staff Leonid Volkov. Navalnaya thanked everyone who took time to remember Alexei Navalny on Tuesday.

Dozens of people gathered outside the Russian embassy at the Hague in the Netherlands on Tuesday to remember Navalny and promise that resistance to corruption and authoritarianism would continue in his name. Some of the demonstrators carried signs denouncing Putin as a “killer,” including signs that accused him of orchestrating Navalny’s death.

“It’s crucial that the name of Navalny continues to be spoken, as every mention ensures that his legacy lives on. I believe every time his name is mentioned, it bothers Putin, which makes it all the more important,” said Vladimir Nechayev, organizer of the demonstration at the Hague.

Another old friend of Navalny’s, Yevgeny Domozhirov, organized a demonstration outside the Russian Embassy in Warsaw, Poland.

Domozhirov said Navalny “meant a lot for my personal political life, and that of the country.” He counted himself among those who believe Navalny was murdered by the Putin regime.

“I knew him for thirteen years, and his murder was a huge personal loss for me,” Domozhirov said.

The gathering was held along the sides of a street called Victims of Russian Aggression Boulevard. The demonstrators asked local officials to consider naming a street near the embassy after Navalny, helpfully waving mocked-up street signs bearing the appropriate Dutch name.

A petition in support of renaming a street for Navalny has been circulating since shortly after his death, accumulating more than 85,000 signatures to date. The petition has already been rejected once by the Hague municipal government, on the grounds that city rules stipulate a minimum interval of ten years after a person’s death before a street can be named after them.

The creator of the petition, Dutch national Lissa Hollmann, said she realized while she was laying down flowers and candles to honor Navalny that “Russian people really weren’t allowed to do that.”

“That they remove candles and flowers, that they detain some people — that was the moment that I thought they want to erase him, that the Kremlin wants us to forget his name,” she said.