A memorial service and a funeral are different rites, and in the Navalny case this distinction proved fundamental. A memorial service is a prayer for the dead that can be held without the body of the deceased, whereas the funeral is performed over the deceased and constitutes the full rite of the church's farewell. Therefore the question of who will take on the service concerns more than form. It is about whether the church will publicly pray for a man whose death became an event for the entire country, and whether it is prepared to do so openly.
In his Novaya Gazeta piece, Soldatov showed that there had been no legal services in ROC parishes. At the same time, he listed the priests who had nonetheless prayed for Navalny or paid for their earlier independence. Abbot Evmeny (Peristy), Archpriest Alexei Uminsky and Hieromonk Ioann (Guayte) were pushed out of Russia. Valerian Dunin-Barkovsky and Andrei Kordochkin held a memorial service abroad. Thus prayer services did occur, but outside the Russian church space and outside official parishes, and the very possibility of holding them in Russia proved to be fraught with risk for the clergy.
An alternative church and its risk
The term 'alternative Orthodox churches' denotes communities that exist outside the canonical field of the Moscow Patriarchate and are not recognised by it. Their primates, as a rule, build their own hierarchy, and the question of self-government in such structures often boils down to the concept of autocephaly, that is, independence from other churches. For officials and for some believers such communities remain marginal, yet in recent years it is precisely they who have been among those ready to perform services where the official church was silent.
Among these structures Soldatov singled out the Apostolic Orthodox Church, which he called a 'singular exception'. Its primate, Archbishop Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko, was detained for merely intending to hold a memorial service for Navalny. After his detention he suffered a stroke. This episode shows that even a symbolic act, not accompanied by the service itself, could result for a cleric outside the official church in criminal or administrative prosecution and a serious blow to his health.
The author called the Apostolic Orthodox Church a 'singular exception'
Close to the APC is the Association of Christian Eucharistic Communities in St Petersburg. Its clergy, as Novaya Gazeta writes, agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because they feared the consequences. For such people, a public statement of readiness to perform the service was a decision involving personal risk, not a formal position of the community.
Readiness without the right to an open service
In conversation with Novaya Gazeta's editorial team, anonymous clerics of the APC and the Association said they were ready to come to Moscow and perform the funeral for Navalny. This readiness was voiced against the background that the official clergy of the Moscow Patriarchate, according to Soldatov, were evading not only the memorial service but also the funeral. The very framing of the question thus shifted from the realm of liturgical practice to that of church and civic stance.
Soldatov's publication appeared a few days after Yulia Navalnaya's appeal of 24 February, which had provided the occasion for the piece. The juxtaposition of the two facts, proposed by Novaya Gazeta, reveals the gap between what the church can say about a person's death and what its parishes actually do. Everything that was done in this story was done either abroad, or in marginal structures, or anonymously.
Clerics of the APC and the Association of Christian Eucharistic Communities told Novaya Gazeta they were ready to come to Moscow and perform the funeral for Navalny.
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