The Kremlin Fears Navalny More in Death Than It Did in Life

The body won't be given to the family until they promise to conduct a secret burial.

Courtesy of Radio Free Europe

Death scares the bejesus out of Russian leaders. Putin is more scared today than he was two weeks ago, before the untimely death of Alexey Navalny. I don’t think that Navalny was supposed to die at this moment. Trapped, the Kremlin was in control of his fate. There was no reason at this moment to end him. Someone messed up, and that someone is now dead and buried, even though Alexey is not. 

The untimely death has led to an even more significant problem for the Kremlin. The dead are stronger than the living because no control mechanisms exist. There is one way, however, to limit the power the dead have over the living, and the power is formidable. The living must be deprived of their right to mourn the dead, and that is precisely how the Kremlin is now combating Alexey Navalny’s superpower. 

Courtesy of PNGtree

Russia does life poorly

For all of its look-at-me drama, self-promotion, and used-car-salesman approach to trying to get the world to pity it, Russian society overall does life badly. There has never been a time in Russian history when the government wasn’t, in some way or another, pretty much just screwing people over for sheer joy that it could. The sense of inadequacy the leaders feel because they don’t solve problems but instead let them fester leads them to work diligently to silence dissent.

The quality of the here and now is painfully low despite all of the propaganda videos of Tucker Carlson and others. One is reminded from birth that at any moment, the “Dear Leader,” or the mini-leaders who populate the rungs on the ladder that inevitably ascends to the Dear Leader, can as if trying to rid himself of a pesky itch, smack anyone down — crush them between their fingers; or even more fun, trap them under a glass and watch as the victim struggles at first to find a way out and then ultimately accepts its fate, and lies down to die. 

Russia, however, does not like it when the formerly pesky bugs die. If it is a no-name pawn, then no problem — die. When people like Alexey Navalny die, however, bad things can happen. 

Russian authorities have declared that the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died of natural causes but are refusing to release his remains until his family agrees to a “secret funeral,” Mr. Navalny’s mother and his spokeswoman said on Thursday.

“They want to take me to the edge of a cemetery to a fresh grave and say, ‘Here lies your son,’” Ms. Navalnaya said in her video from Salekhard, the closest city to the Arctic prison where Mr. Navalny died last week. “I don’t agree with this. I want those of you who valued Aleksei and take his death as a personal tragedy to have the chance to say farewell to him (Authorities Are Blackmailing Her).”

Graves turn into memorials, which then turn into meeting spots. The visuals will not be good and will scream Soviet-era repression if, in central Moscow, at a Russian Orthodox cemetery, thousands of gathering mourners are being viciously beaten by the Kremlin’s stormtroopers. The reaction to the placing of red carnations at makeshift memorials was brutal. Hundreds were arrested, and many were beaten. What happens when thousands flock to a gravesite? 

Repressive regimes like Russia’s fascist pseudo-junta fear memorials like frequent flyers in the middle seat on intercontinental flights. Any physical spot that can possibly serve as a place where angry and emotional Navalny followers can regularly be reminded of how sick and unfair Russia’s political repression has become creates instability in the halls of the Kremlin. Morning, day, and evening discussions will inevitably revert to “So, how many are out there today? What slogans are appearing? Have we infiltrated them?” It will become like Trump’s obsession with the imagined voter fraud.

As we saw in the kaffeeklatch he shared with his buddy Tucker Carlson, Putin is barely holding onto reality. Don’t forget Putin’s and so Russia’s official view is that “Poland started World War II.” Poor Adolf asked kindly for the city of Danzig back, but those brazen Poles instead named it “Gdansk” and shot Hitler the bird — and mooned him. Of course, they deserved to be invaded, occupied, and then have their capital city practically wiped off the face of the earth for such an affront. Bad Poland, Bad Poland (SARCASM ALERT).

Putin has yet to mention a single word about Navalny. The media in Russia has been ordered to move on. As I wrote in an earlier article, Putinists just look at this death as something that happens every day in the world. My friend who works at Gazprom wrote me — and I am struggling to call her still my friend — “What’s the big deal, people die.” The Kremlin just wants to pretend that this never happened and, as quickly as possible, stuff this box of memories up into the attic with a note, “Don’t Open Until Leap Year 2156.” 

In an interview posted to YouTube on Thursday, Mr. Zhdanov said that investigators, under orders from Moscow, tried to limit Mr. Navalny’s relatives in their choice of cemetery and funeral hall. Mr. Zhdanov compared the authorities’ demands to the funeral of the mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who was laid to rest secretly in St. Petersburg after leading a 24-hour mutiny against the Kremlin and dying in a plane crash two months later.

“It is hard to surprise us,” Mr. Zhdanov said. “But it was hard to imagine that a mother would be blackmailed with a rotting body in order to bring it to Moscow and bury it in secret (Authorities Are Blackmailing Her).”

History, and not just Russian history, is filled with “memorials” that served as meeting places for dissenters. The Allies purposely blew up Hitler’s house in Bergtesgaden in the Alps so it could not serve as a rallying point. Many a murder, revolution, and protest has been fomented in the tears, poems, flowers, and despair of crowds of desperate people mourning an injustice. This is a history that Putin knows only too well. He watched as the Berlin Wall stopped being a wall only to become a reason, a purpose, a mandate for action. 

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but just like I said, they wouldn’t — couldn’t — let Boris Nadezhdin run for president, I seriously don’t think the Kremlin will let Navalny’s body return to be buried in Moscow. A burial in Moscow could seriously put Putin’s membership in the rotten dictator’s club in jeopardy.