THE SENTENCING this week of Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition politician, to 25 years in jail shocked even those inured to the repressiveness of Russia’s court system. Yan Rachinsky, the chair of Memorial, a human-rights group that was recently outlawed, described the length of the sentence as Stalinist. Mr Kara-Murza himself expressed surprise at how far the trial went beyond the norms of late Soviet dissident trials. “Things like this might have been present in the 1930s, not the 1970s,” he said.

Mr Kara-Murza, a British-Russian national, was sentenced on an implausible mix of charges: state treason, disinformation and working for a banned “undesirable” organisation founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled former oligarch. His real crime is to speak against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr Kara-Murza knew the risks of continuing political activity in Russia, having already survived two suspected poisoning attempts that left him in fragile health. Friends and colleagues say that he also accepted the prospect of arrest. “He said it was a reasonable inference,” said Kirill Rogov, an analyst, who spoke to him in early 2022, just before he returned to Russia. “He sighed and said that if you are a Russian politician, you need to be in Russia at this moment.”

Mr Kara-Murza’s sentence comes after a series of ever-expanding wartime laws, limiting all kinds of dissent against Mr Putin. These are being interpreted with increasing harshness. Last month security services arrested Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, on espionage charges. On April 18th, the day following Mr Kara-Murza’s sentencing, Russia announced a further widening of the legislative net, lengthening the maximum sentence for so-called state treason from 20 years to life. Lawyers representing those selected for trial have also been targeted. Vadim Prokhorov, who was defending Mr Kara-Murza, left Russia shortly before the verdict. He had been tipped off that he would be next.

Maria Eismont, a human-rights lawyer who represents Mr Kara-Murza, remains in Moscow. In our podcast series Next Year in Moscow she explains the logic of carrying on with her work in a country where security services are above the law. One reason, she said, is that in Russian courts “you can openly say things that are, for a long time, prohibited to say elsewhere”.

In returning to Russia, Mr Kara-Murza followed the example of Alexei Navalny, who went back in January 2021, after he was poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent. In our podcast’s final episode, available on April 22nd, Kira Yarmysh, his spokesperson, tells us that he has been kept in solitary confinement since last summer and that his health is deteriorating. Mr Navalny’s spirit, she says, remains as strong as ever.

The state is now preparing a new case against him. Mr Navalny is currently serving a nine-year sentence on trumped-up charges, but prosecutors have opened a new investigation on far-fetched charges of terrorism and extremism, which carries a jail sentence of up to 35 years. They wasted little time in connecting Mr Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation with the assassination on April 2nd in St Petersburg of Vladlen Tatarsky, a pro-war blogger.

Vladimir Ashurkov, a London-based associate of Mr Navalny, says he expects “nothing good” to come of any new trial. But he says it is understood that Mr Navalny—like Mr Kara-Murza and other political prisoners—will remain in prison for as long as Mr Putin retains power. “Even now Alexei’s term is nine years, which is over the horizon of visibility that anyone has about contemporary Russia,” says Mr Ashurkov.

The Kremlin uses repression and propaganda to silence Russians who oppose Mr Putin’s war. It seems to hope that sentences like Mr Kara-Murza’s will persuade its foes to abandon hope. But some observers believe that the increase in harshness is a sign that the authorities are nervous.

Repression should be understood as a form of communication between the state and its subjects, suggests Grigory Okhotin, the founder of OVD-Info, a legal-support network for the victims of police violence. “It’s like an invisible hand,” he says. It is felt more strongly when people start to push the boundaries of what is allowed. The authorities “move when people start to fear less. Demonstrative sentences are a sign of failure, of losing control.” ■