ANDREY SMIRNOV / AFP / Getty Images Pussy Riot band members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich sit behind bars during a court hearing in Moscow on July 30, 2012

On Feb. 8, a month before Vladimir Putin faced re-election for a third term as Russia’s President, he paid a visit to the St. Daniel Monastery in Moscow, where he received an endorsement from Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. They tiptoed around the issue of the elections at first. Under the constitution, there is a clear divide between church and state, so the Patriarch isn’t really supposed to interfere in politics. But eventually they softened up, and Kirill called Putin’s time in office nothing less than a “godly miracle,” thanking him for saving Russia from the “catastrophe” of the 1990s. Putin responded with a rather remarkable statement: “We must move away from the primitive notion of separation between church and state,” he said. “On the contrary, we must devote ourselves to the totally different idea of cooperation.” And cooperate they did. Before departing, Putin pledged about $120 million for the construction of Orthodox churches, and the message became clear for the millions of Orthodox faithful in Russia: Putin is the greatest President Russia has ever had.

But for many in the opposition movement, that meeting marked a blatant affront to the constitution. It seemed to conflate religious and political authority in a way that harked back to the czarist era, when the church worked in the service of the Emperor, and it did not take long for a group of activists called Pussy Riot to make their reply. On Feb. 21, four of them, along with a group of photographers and cameramen, walked into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the holiest site in Russian Orthodoxy, pulled colorful balaclavas over their heads and performed a “punk prayer” on the altar that was titled “Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” The video quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of YouTube views, becoming a symbol of the opposition movement, which had just begun to find its voice in the lead up to the elections.

(MORE: The Flimsy Case Against Pussy Riot)

By that point, Pussy Riot had gained some clout among the opposition for their political performances — or “actions” — against Putin’s 12-year rule. A few weeks earlier, they had danced with electric guitars on Red Square, atop the pedestal where the Czars once held public executions, and they posted a video online of a pudgy Kremlin guard trying to make them climb down from there. They were also planning to storm the Russian parliament and hold a performance on the podium during a plenary session. But they never pulled that one off, because on March 5, the day after Putin won another term in office, two members of Pussy Riot were arrested. A third soon joined them in prison, and instead of charging them with the misdemeanor of trespassing or disturbing the peace, investigators hit them with charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” a felony that carries a sentence of at least two years and a maximum of seven. Their trial, which began this week, has crammed into the space of a single, dingy courtroom all of the political divisions, restrictions and anachronisms that will define which way Russia goes from here.

The signs are pointing nowhere good. “We are seeing a concerted effort to instill fear, to let everyone know that dissent will no longer be tolerated,” says Masha Lipman, a political analyst in Moscow. This effort began right after Putin’s inauguration on May 7, and has used every branch of power as a bludgeon. The parliament, for instance, has passed new laws restricting street protests. Special forces have raided the homes of activists involved in demonstrations. Courts are preparing to hear felony charges against demonstrators later this year. Top officials have started advocating censorship of Internet content. And on July 31, the anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny, the unofficial leader of the Russian protest movement, was informed that he faces up to 10 years in prison for allegedly embezzling half a million dollars worth of timber in 2009. The charges are so sketchy that prosecutors have dropped them twice before for lack of evidence, only to have investigators reopen the case. This time, the amount of money allegedly embezzled was raised more than 10-fold and the charges made much more severe. “This is not all coming down at once by some coincidence. It is a pattern,” says Lipman.

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But of all the facets in this pattern, the trial against Pussy Riot has been the most draconian. Here were three feminist punk rockers in their 20s, with no prior criminal record, deemed too dangerous to receive bail, locked up for almost half a year, away from their families and young children, and facing long stints in prison for a crime that would earn them no more than a juridical wag of the finger just about anywhere else in the Western world. The cost to Russia’s image has already been enormous, with newspapers across the world printing images of their cherubic faces peering out through metal bars. Comparisons to the witch trials of the Middle Ages have come hard and fast, and given the fact that only about 1% of Russian criminal cases end in acquittal, the young women of Pussy Riot are almost sure to be sent away for at least the two-year minimum sentence.

On the first day of the trial, Prosecutor Alexander Nikiforov seemed keenly aware of the social repercussions of this case. The trial, he said in his opening remarks, “has practically split society into two parts.” That was clear enough from the survey released the following day by the Levada Center, an independent polling agency. It showed that a third of Russians saw the proposed sentence of two to seven years as “adequate,” while 43% said it was excessive.

The prosecution’s case, which comes to 2,800 pages, has focused exclusively on the religious aspects of the case, ignoring the defendants’ obvious political motives. While entering their not-guilty pleas on Monday, the defendants tried to protest this interpretation of their crime. “Our motives had nothing to do with religious hatred,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova told the court. “It is incredibly cruel to impose such motivations on us … Our actions were political.” Locked inside the bulletproof-glass cage reserved for defendants in the courtroom, Yekaterina Samutsevich, another one of the defendants, said their action was meant to protest the Patriarch’s endorsement of Putin. “The court cannot ignore our ideology,” said the third defendant, Maria Alyokhina.

The presiding judge, Marina Syrova, let the remarks stand, and the following day, the court began to hear the testimony of the victims in the case, which seemed so off-kilter to the hall full of journalists that Syrova was forced to ban laughing in the courtroom. For almost 12 hours on Tuesday, the victims cataloged the spiritual suffering they endured after seeing Pussy Riot’s “desecration” of the cathedral. (Nothing in the church, by the way, was vandalized or damaged during their performance, which lasted about a minute before security guards escorted the activists out.)

(MORE: When a Protest Fizzles: Russia’s Opposition Routed After Putin Election)

On Wednesday, the prosecution called its first two witnesses, neither of whom had actually witnessed the crime. The first one, Oleg Ugrik, an Orthodox believer who said he works in construction, had seen the Pussy Riot video online, and he was so disturbed by the “black energy that swept over” him afterward that he called the police to offer his help. When he reached the investigators working on the case, he says he was invited to testify against Pussy Riot in court, and he eagerly accepted. “These girls lowered themselves into hell of their own volition,” he told the court. “The rot that they have released into society, thanks to the Internet,” has spread to millions of people, he said, accusing the girls of representing a satanic cult that has “declared war against God and the Orthodox Church.” Even while the girls have been in jail, he said, “this tumor has continued to grow.”

The second witness, Eteri Ivanishvili, who works as a bursar in another church in Moscow, had an equally tenuous connection to the crime. She had seen reports of it on television and had witnessed a similar incident in her church, so the prosecution deemed her fit to testify. On Wednesday afternoon, she entered the courtroom with a beehive hairdo and an elaborate parasol, which she hung on the side of the witness stand. “All the TV channels reported it,” she said. “It was horrible, all those baffled faces of the parishioners. I saw everything.” During cross examination, however, she could not name the program on which she had seen Pussy Riot. The judge struck down any question related to politics or, indeed, criminal law, so the defense was left to cross examine her about the rules of etiquette that apply in an Orthodox church. If a cell phone starts playing loud music, for instance, is its owner punished for the disturbance? But the judge struck down this line of questioning as well.

Outside the courthouse, dusk was falling by the time the hearing ended on Wednesday, and the relatives of the accused wandered around among the packs of journalists, listening to the lawyers’ despondent remarks. “This is an inquisition, an exorcism of a trial,” said one of the attorneys, Nikolay Polozov. The father of one of the defendants, Vladimir Zhiyanov, looked on sadly with a briefcase in his hand and an Orthodox cross hanging from his neck. “I don’t know what to make of it,” he told TIME. “I’m confused. I guess Putin is trying to tell us how it’s going to be while he’s in power. He will make the rules up as he sees fit.” Staring down the street at the police cordon set up around the courthouse, he added, “If that’s the case, God help us,” and he gave a joyless smile.