LAST July the Duma, Russia’s parliament, passed a law requiring NGOs that receive funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”. Since then the new legal provisions have been conspicuously unenforced. No one registered and nothing happened: the law sat there, a kind of sword of Damocles over civil-society groups that could swing down at any moment. This moment seems to have arrived. In early March, state prosecutors—along with officers from the tax service and justice ministry—began to make spot inspections of dozens of NGOs across Russia, arriving unannounced to demand everything from staff lists to tax records. The prosecutor’s office only says, blandly, that it is checking “adherence to the law”. More than 80 organisations in 22 regions have been visited so far, says Pavel Chikov of Agora, a legal-aid NGO, though he suspects the real number is considerably higher, and could eventually climb to more than 2,000. (Agora’s turn came on March 27th, when it received a request from prosecutors to hand over documents by next week.)

Life has never been that easy for civic-society groups in Russia, especially for those active on issues the state considers politically sensitive: throughout the Putin era, their work has been complicated by opaque regulations and the targeted use of bureaucratic pressure. Some have been singled out, such as Golos, a vote-monitoring group, which was the subject of a campaign of harassment around the time of Duma elections in December 2011. Yet it is the first time that so many NGOs, working on disparate issues and spread out across the country, have faced a large, single wave of meddlesome inspections all at once.

Why now? One answer is that when the Duma first passed the “foreign agent” law, it put the justice ministry in charge of monitoring NGOs and enforcing the new rules—a role it clearly did not relish. Alexander Konovalov, the justice minster, told the Duma the law was effectively unenforceable and displayed a hesitance to carry out its provisions that bordered on insubordination.

In mid-February Vladimir Putin, the president (pictured above), gave a public speech to officers of the FSB, the intelligence service, saying that the new laws on NGOs “should certainly be executed” and that “interference in our internal affairs” is “unacceptable”. That was not so much a signal as a direct order. Another factor is that the prosecutor’s office, which has taken the energetic lead in carrying out the current inspections, is eager to curry favor and regain influence after finding itself on the losing end of a years-long struggle with the rival Investigative Committee.

More broadly, Mr Putin is recasting his unwritten contract with the country’s elite and experimenting with a new ideology to appeal to the Russian public. A public attack on NGOs is a way to try to suppress their work, pushing them to the margins of political and social life. Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch, whose Moscow office was searched on March 27th too, says the authorities would like to induce a state of “shock and intimidation” and remind those working for NGOs that the new laws “are not on paper only as some of you hoped”.

At the same time, demanding so many documents on nearly every aspect of a NGO’s work is a means to “collect information and see later how it might be used,” says Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who covers the security services. An organisation may, for example, turn out to have a building code violation or financial irregularity. More likely, records could show that an NGO engages in “political activity” and receives at least some foreign money, giving the state the legal muscle to force it to join the yet empty foreign-agent register. (If an NGO then refuses, according to the law, authorities could halt its activities or close it altogether.)

The campaign has propaganda value too. In Moscow, nearly every inspection has been joined by a camera crew from NTV, the state-owned channel that has aired a series of conspiratorial documentaries over the past year. These have alleged everything from last winter’s protests being spurred on by the American embassy to bloggers being behind a plot to discredit the Russian Orthodox Church. Last week, after accompanying prosecutors to Memorial, a renowned human-rights group, NTV broadcast a segment called “Memorial Is Hiding Its Revenue From the General Prosecutor”.

The list of those NGOs inspected in recent days and weeks is, at least in part, obvious: Memorial has been visited numerous times, along with many that work on issues relating to election monitoring or tracking state abuses. But the scope of the visits has gone far beyond the Kremlin’s usual adversaries. In Rostov, 220km northeast of Moscow, prosecutors visited local representatives of the Catholic and Baptist churches; in Saratov, a port town on the Volga, the Russian Bird Conservation Union was inspected.

Local representative offices of foreign NGOs—such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and International Crisis Group—have also been inspected, even though their legal status puts them outside the requirements of the foreign-agents law. It appears that prosecutors will cast a wide net for now, and sort the details out later.

For the moment, the greatest complaint among NGO workers is that they are being distracted from their main activities. Lev Ponomaryov, the head of For Human Rights, has refused to hand over required material to prosecutors. “What, I should give up all my work and devote my time to gathering documents? I’m not ready to live as a marionette,” he says.

The larger fear, many in civic-society groups say, is that other newly passed laws that have so far remained dormant will also be reanimated. In November Mr Putin signed a law on treason, lobbied for by the FSB, which covers not only Russians who pass secrets to a foreign intelligence service, but anyone who offers information or assistance to a foreign state or international group "directed against Russia's security". Such persons could be sent to prison for 20 years. So far, the new law remains unused.