Alexei Navalny’s funeral

Alexei Navalny’s funeral

The Russian opposition leader who died suddenly at an Arctic penal colony earlier this month, will be laid to rest Friday in Moscow — around 6am for you East Coast early birds.

Navalny’s family and colleagues have accused authorities of preventing a wider civil ceremony to honor him. Last week Navalny’s mother said the penal colony threatened to withhold his body entirely unless she promised a private funeral.

Navalny’s wife Yulia, who has sworn to continue her late husband’s work, warned on Wednesday that she didn’t know if the funeral, or the trip across town to the cemetery, would be “peaceful.”

We’ll be watching to see how many people show up and how ferociously Russian President Vladimir Putin cracks down. This is, after all, the funeral of a man who at his peak was able to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets to decry Putin’s party of “crooks and thieves.”

Putin, for his part, has a choice to make: it’s important to nip any protests in the bud, particularly as he heads towards a sham “election” later this month. But as every strongman knows, cracking down too hard risks heightening the symbolic and political power of the event.

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