During Soviet times, “At least we knew the rules,” said Irina Prokhorova, a publisher and vocal critic of the government. “This is a little bit different, because there are no rules, no official censorship.” Ms. Prokhorova likened the climate to the 1930s, when the Nazis labeled art degenerate. “This is aesthetic fundamentalism,” she said. The law on religious believers is particularly slippery. “Who are those believers? What do they believe in? No one talks about this,” she added.

This week, a debate has been raging after it emerged on Sunday that Russia’s culture minister had ousted the director of a state-run theater in Siberia on the grounds that a production of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with a backdrop in which an image of Christ was placed in the crotch of a naked woman, had run afoul of the law against offending religious believers — even after a judge last month dropped the case as groundless.

Russia has a thriving theater scene and a constitution that bans top-down, Soviet-style censorship. But in a time of economic turmoil and growing nationalism, with society polarized in unpredictable and emotional ways over the new laws and the war in Ukraine, cultural figures say the message from the government is clear: Fall in line with the emphasis on family and religious values, or lose funding, or worse.

“It’s about betrayal — those who betray are put in the Ninth Circle of Hell, like in Dante,” Kirill Serebrennikov, a prominent theater and film director and the director of the Gogol Center, a cornerstone of Moscow’s theater scene, said in a recent interview here. The result, he said, was to put writers and directors “between Scylla and Charybdis — between censorship or self-censorship.”

That day, Mr. Serebrennikov was puzzling over a report in Izvestia, a newspaper seen as close to the Kremlin, that scholars from a research institute were evaluating whether recent theater productions had “distorted” classic Russian texts. They included his production of Gogol’s “Dead Souls” at the Gogol Center and productions of “Boris Godunov” and “The Karamazovs,” based on the Dostoyevsky novel, both mounted by the popular director Konstantin Bogomolov at other theaters.