SOCHI, Russia — ON Feb. 7, the opening day of the Olympics, several people walked out onto Red Square in Moscow. When they attempted to sing the Russian national anthem, all were arrested and taken to the nearest police station. “We were holding small rainbow flags to show support for the L.G.B.T. community,” wrote my protester friend, who found herself taken into custody for the first time in her life.
The following day, the police arrested a group that had gathered in Manezhnaya Square, in Moscow. The arrests came immediately after about 60 people unfurled umbrellas in support of Russia’s only independent television channel, Dozhd. The channel was recently dropped by all major cable operators under pressure from the government, which appeared to have been exacting revenge for a viewer poll question it didn’t like.
The question was: “Would it have been better to surrender Leningrad to the Nazis during World War II in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives?” One question — deemed “unpatriotic” — and the channel is on the verge of closing. Simply because President Vladimir V. Putin knows best how one should love one’s country.
This week in Sochi, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, another member of Pussy Riot, and I were detained three times and then, on Wednesday, assaulted by Cossack militiamen with whips and pepper spray. Mr. Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.
More than $50 billion was sunk into the construction of Olympic venues — giant, meaningless, alien objects whose purpose is to feed the ego of the country’s president, elevating him to the rank of a pharaoh or emperor. The host city of Sochi has essentially become a closed military facility. Access to the city is restricted and will remain so for another month after the Olympics end.
Environmentalists’ concerns about illegal construction, enabled by corrupt business dealings, are well founded. Mr. Putin has turned the wartime siege of Leningrad into a sacrosanct event, all while imposing a new siege on Sochi.
Can a pharaoh shut down a city, can he declare a blockade in time of peace? Yes, if he lives and rules in Russia. This is how Dozhd came to be denounced by the government — for posing a question about a siege during a siege.
The face of these Olympics is deceptive, as is the entire authoritarian regime. At first, the authorities do not strike out at you directly. Rather, they systematically force you to adopt the only stance they deem proper, which is to move passively, apolitically, through the entire chain of post-Soviet institutions, from primary school to the grave.
Nikolai Zabolotsky, a Russian avant-garde poet who was repressed under Stalin and spent eight years in exile, compared progressing through life’s stages to being transferred through the gulag’s series of transit prisons. The realities of the Stalin era made the voicing of a direct metaphor like this necessary, even at the cost of losing one’s freedom.
The reality of contemporary Russia, and Mr. Putin’s goal, is to kill such metaphors — by force, if necessary — and to kill the reflection, analysis and criticism they carry. The quasi-fascist direction of this regime over the past 13 years depends on this deadening of the intellect. For as soon as obliviousness ends, so does Mr. Putin’s power.
Those who are writing about the Olympics and who are currently present at the Games should not fall into this forgetfulness, because it is fatal. When you talk about the Olympics — whether you like it or not — you are talking about Russia. For this is a country where people are arrested for waving umbrellas and little flags, where they are sent to penal colonies, like the environmental activist Yevgeny Vitishko, for writing a slogan like “the forest is for everybody” on a governor’s fence, and where they may be sentenced to five or six years in prison for voicing their dissent against the status quo.
Because of their dissent, the most honest people in our country are currently in jail as defendants in the Bolotnaya Square case. They came to the Moscow square on May 6, 2012, to join a protest against fraud in the presidential elections, and they chanted, “Putin, get out!” They were beaten with truncheons by riot police officers, arrested, jailed and put on trial.
For the past year and a half, they have had to make repeated appearances in a kangaroo court, where, day after day, they are being silently tortured as part of Mr. Putin’s broader policy. On Feb. 5, they made their final pleas; their verdicts are due on Feb. 21.
This story is bigger than the Olympic venues, bigger even than the Olympics. This is a story about the real Russia of today. It exists, and the price of its existence is prison sentences for innocent people who speak out.
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