Police detain an elderly woman for placing a portrait of Alexei Navalny on a memorial to political prisoners in St. Petersburg, Russia, 16 February 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / ANATOLY MALTSEV

At least 26 people in 12 cities across Russia were detained by police on Sunday for attending unsanctioned rallies commemorating the first anniversary of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s death in prison, Russian human rights organisation OVD-Info reported.

Local human rights activists reported 10 detentions in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, at least three in Moscow and Ufa, and two in Voronezh. Individual detentions were also made in Belgorod, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, St. Petersburg, Ukhta, Ulyanovsk and Chelyabinsk, OVD-Info added.

Most of those detained were ultimately released without charge, though as OVD-Info reported, there were widespread incidents in which those who laid flowers in honour of Navalny were filmed by both uniformed and plain clothes police officers, as well as many cases of people having their personal details collected by the security forces. Makeshift memorials to Navalny and flowers left at various monuments to the victims of Soviet political repression were quickly removed and in many cases, public access to monuments was closed.

Over 5,000 people visited Moscow’s Borisovsky Cemetery, where Navalny is buried, on Sunday, according to volunteer network Bely Schyotchik, which attempts to count the number of people attending rallies and marches.

“Borisovsky cemetery is historical and not very large, so it makes sense to believe that almost all of those who came and queued went specifically to the grave of Alexey”, the organisation wrote in a post on Facebook.

On 1 March 2024, at least 16,500 people joined Navalny’s funeral procession as his body was transported from the church where the service was performed to Borisovsky Cemetery where he was buried, White Counter said at the time, adding that their estimate was “only a fraction” of the total number of participants, whose total number had been impossible to calculate.