The exiled daughter of assassinated Kremlin political foe Boris Nemtsov has called the treatment of the body of recently deceased opposition leader Aleksei Navalny by Russian officials "absolutely terrifying, surreal" and a "monstrous, inhumane story" that demonstrates just how deeply President Vladimir Putin fears Navalny's legacy of dissent.
"Vladimir Putin is afraid of the dead Navalny no less than he was afraid of the living Navalny," Zhenna Nemtsova told Current Time in a televised interview a week after Russian authorities said Navalny died after collapsing at an Arctic prison.
Zhanna Nemtsova
Nemtsova's father was a popular post-Soviet politician who became a vocal Putin critic who, like Navalny, produced in-depth reports of corruption before his death.
Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin in Moscow in February 2015, weeks after publicly expressing fears that Putin might have him killed.
Nemtsova said Russian state TV initially "covered my father very favorably but everything changed...when there was a funeral march" that demonstrated her father's popularity with tens of thousands of Russians taking to the streets even for "a political corpse."
Russian authorities subsequently discouraged expressions of mourning or looked the other way as ultranationalists bullied the slain sympathizers.
Mourners surround the coffin at the funeral of Russian leading opposition figure Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015.
"They understand that the same thing will happen with Aleksei Navalny" if public memorials are allowed, Nemtsova said.
She told Current Time she is "absolutely convinced that millions of people in Russia and outside Russia are deeply concerned and mourning the murder of [Navalny] in prison." She predicted hundreds of thousands would attend if a funeral were held for him even amid the current repression.
Russia has doubled down on tools like "foreign agent" and "undesirable" designations in addition to brutal beatings and detentions to minimize public dissent since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began two years ago.
Still, police detained hundreds across the country in the days after Navalny's death and quickly eliminated makeshift memorials that sprung up in dozens of cities.
Navalny's widow and his mother have accused Putin of responsibility for his death, as have U.S. President Joe Biden and some other Western officials.
SEE ALSO: Navalny's Body Handed Over To His Mother, Aides Of Kremlin Critic SayRussian officials deny foul play but have not released the remains and reportedly demanded a private memorial before they would hand over his body to Navalny's mother.
"I believe that Aleksei was killed on Putin's orders, and they are afraid that in the run-up to the elections, hundreds of thousands of people will come to say goodbye to Aleksei," Nemtsova said.
Putin is seeking to win a fifth presidential term in a carefully controlled March 15-17 vote in which election officials have already disqualified the only seemingly authentic anti-war aspirant.
Nemtsova said Putin's administration is trying to "dehumanize" in a similar way to what followed the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and her father's assassination a year later, including through accusations that Kremlin critics are "traitors."
"[B]ecause you must first dehumanize, and then you deal with your enemy, and people don’t feel sorry for the person they consider a traitor," she said. "The same thing has been tried for years."