During past periods of chaos and brutality in Russia, such as Stalin’s Great Terror, there was generally a sense that the country was headed somewhere—that the suffering served some end, however unjustifiable the means. But the repression Russians are enduring today has only one aim: to perpetuate the state that is executing it.

NEW YORK—On September 25, a Moscow court sent the political analyst Alexander Kynev to pretrial detention for “large-scale illegal drug production, sale, and trafficking”—a charge that could land him in prison for 10–20 years. But no evidence of Kynev’s involvement in illegal drugs has been made public.