Police warn Russians not to join ‘mass actions’ in memory of Navalny

Police in Moscow have warned the public against participating “in illegal mass actions” following multiple detentions of people laying flowers in memory of Alexey Navalny across the country on Friday.

Unofficial events paying tribute to Navalny are planned in cities across Russia on Saturday afternoon. In Moscow, the action is planned at the Wall of Grief, a national memorial unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 dedicated to the victims of Stalinist repression.

On Friday afternoon, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district announced Navalny’s sudden death in a penal colony in a remote area of the Russian Arctic where the outspoken Kremlin critic had been serving a lengthy jail sentence.

In the hours following the announcement, impromptu gatherings in Navalny’s memory were held in dozens of cities across Russia. Anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova estimated that people laid flowers and created makeshift memorials, nearly all of them next to monuments to the victims of Soviet repression, in some 92 different Russian cities.

According to human rights non-profit OVD-Info, the authorities detained over 100 people attending such events in cities including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Tver and Murmansk.