Repressions Report. February 2024
On 16 February, Alexei Navalny was killed in the colony in the village of Kharp (Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region). After this, the politician’s family could not receive the body for a long time, and people all over Russia were detained while laying flowers in his memory. The funeral service and the burial were only held two weeks later.
Minniyar Bayguskarov was buried in Baymak (a small provincial town in the Republic Bashkortostan). According to the official version, he committed suicide. Locals reported that the man had been severely beaten during interrogations concerning a criminal case regarding protests in support of activist Fayil Alsynov.
OVD-Info reports on these and other important cases of political pressure in this February chronicle.
Текст на русском
Alexei Navalny’s murder
On 16 February, the Federal Penitentiary Service on its website published a press release, reporting the death of Alexei Navalny. The authors of the text claimed that the major Kremlin’s opponent «felt bad after the walk», and that the medical workers who «immediately» arrived at the scene were unable to do anything. Propaganda news channel Russia Today soon wrote that a «detached blood clot» was the cause. OVD-Info considers the incident a murder.
That very evening, Russians began laying flowers at monuments to victims of repression to honour Navalny’s memory. Several hundreds of people faced detention due to the mourning events. The politician’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, fought for over a week to get her son’s body and bury him publicly. During this time, she was threatened that «something will be done» with her son’s body, she was told she must agree to the terms of law enforcement officers and organise a secret funeral because «time is not working [in her favour], the corpse is decomposing».
OVD-Info ran the ‘Dyatel’ [Woodpecker] campaign, where people could send their appeals to the Investigative Committee demanding that Navalny’s body be handed over to his relatives. A little less than 100 thousand people sent such appeals.
The politician’s funeral took place on 1 March in Moscow: the service was held at the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows Church and buried at the Borisovsky Cemetery. On the day of the funeral, OVD-Info became aware of more than 90 arrests throughout Russia.