For the second day in a row, mourners walked purposefully along Moscow’s snow-heaped Garden Ring on Saturday carrying bouquets to lay at one of the improvised memorials to Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who perished in a prison colony the day before.
The flowers, wrapped in paper to shield them from the icy wind, were not only a symbol of mourning. They also served as a form of protest in a country where even the mildest dissent can risk detention. And the people who laid bouquets at the Wall of Grief, a monument to the victims of political persecution during the Josef Stalin era, shared the conviction that the Russian state was behind Navalny’s death.
"He didn’t die, he was killed,” said Alla, 75, a pensioner who declined to give her last name because of possible repercussions.