On Monday morning, Andrei Zubov, a sixty-two-year-old history professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, heard a knock on his apartment door. When he opened it, a postman handed him an official telegram, requesting his presence that afternoon at the university’s personnel office. When Zubov arrived, the school’s vice-rector wordlessly handed him a signed letter: he had been fired, in accordance with Point 8, Article 81 of the state labor code, which covers the “commission of an immoral act incompatible with the continuation of work.” The statute is usually applied to instructors who show up to lecture while drunk, for example, or who harass female students.

Zubov’s “immoral act” was an op-ed, published on March 1st, in Vedomosti, the country’s most respected daily newspaper. Under the headline “This Has Already Happened,” Zubov compared the Russian seizure of Crimea, justified as a defense of Russian-speakers there, to Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the German-speaking Sudetenland, in 1938 and 1939. Everything seemed “radiant” for Hitler at first, Zubov wrote: after all, he had expanded the Reich “without a single shot, without a single drop of blood—is the Fuhrer in fact not a brilliant politician?” Putin’s aims, Zubov later said, were not like Hitler’s. But just as Germany eventually paid the price for its conquests, Zubov suggested, so would Russia. “Our politicians are drawing our nation into a terrible, horrifying venture,” he wrote. “We should not buy into this as the Germans bought into Goebbels and Hitler’s promises.”

The university’s statement explaining Zubov’s dismissal claimed that his writings “contradict Russia’s foreign policy and inflict careless, irresponsible criticism on the actions of the state, thus causing damage to the teaching and educational process.” The offending article, the university claimed, had caused “outrage and confusion in the university community.” Zubov, who graduated from the Moscow State Institute in 1973, with a major in Asian studies, describes himself as a member of the late-Soviet dissident intelligentsia, and he looks the part: a swirly gray beard; a tweed jacket; speech laced with long, discursive historical metaphors; and a dark, book-filled apartment on a quiet lane in the center of Moscow, where I met him two days after he had been fired. “I decided to conduct an experiment, like a doctor, but on myself,” Zubov said, describing his decision to write the piece that cost him his job. “If we were headed toward dictatorship, it would end, of course, with my expulsion from the university.”

Zubov had been targeted by a newly vigorous hunt for internal enemies—a campaign against those who do not share in Russia’s officially sanctioned mood of expansionary euphoria. In an address to Parliament on March 18th, Putin raised the spectre of “a fifth column”—a “disparate bunch of national traitors”—sowing discord inside Russia. Putin’s menacing language, a loyal member of Parliament from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party told me, was simply expressing “what has been known for a long time.” Anyone “who plays along with the interests of another state is either an idiot or a traitor,” the deputy said, adding that this was “a scientific fact.” (Angela Merkel was right to describe Putin as “in another world,” the deputy said. “He’s in a different league, he is in a dialogue with history.”)

Putin’s speech took place two days after the Crimean referendum, but it was as much a declaration of the new rules and motifs of Putinism, rich with grievance and triumph, as it was a statement about the disputed peninsula. He was furious, but proud of the spoils he had brought home: at long last, there had been some measure of historical revenge for the injustices Russia had suffered since the Soviet collapse. “If you compress a spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard,” he said.

The annexation of Crimea—not the act itself as much as its reverberating effect on Russian politics and society—has consolidated the new operating model for Putin’s rule, which had already been taking shape. Ever since Putin returned to the Presidency, in 2012, he has searched for an ideological, even spiritual, underpinning for his grip on power. Disturbed by a protest movement that briefly seemed formidable and a slowing economy, Putin turned to a mishmash of nationalism, conservative values, Russian Orthodoxy, and a fear of the corrupting influence of the degenerate West. If his first decade in power had been justified by a growing economy and improved living standards, then his third term would be justified by the grandeur of historical destiny.

Crimea marks a capstone to this shift in orientation: a new and harder era, in which isolation and conflict with the West are virtues in and of themselves. Gone is the postmodern carnival defined by people like Vladislav Surkov, a showman and manipulator who helped Putin construct the political culture of the aughts.

Putin is turning the country away from a time when citizens were expected to be passive and inert, and toward an era when they must be jumpy, mobilized, and ready to defend the state at any cost. The need for enemies is obvious: to rally the patriotic masses for the struggle that lies ahead. The idea of a fifth column, Zubov said—he presumes himself to be considered among its members—is to show that those who disagree with the state are not “political opponents in the political arena” but “enemies who naturally have to be isolated; you have to fight them until they are all exhausted.”

For many years, Russia’s small number of liberals were regarded as essentially harmless; they could safely be mocked or ignored, left alone to their nice restaurants and online magazines. But now the stakes are higher: one widely read news portal, Lenta.ru, just had its editor replaced by a Kremlin loyalist. Dozhd, an independent cable channel, has come under intense pressure and is in danger of needing to shut down.

As the space for independent journalism shrinks, the propaganda apparatus is working at feverish speed. Dmitry Kiselyov, a television host and media executive who represents the id of the state propaganda machine at its most grotesque, blamed this same fifth column for the sanctions imposed against more than thirty Russian and Ukrainian officials by the European Union. Kiselyov, who was among those sanctioned, cited Putin’s speech as evidence to blame the fifth column for compiling the blacklist. “Putin legalized that term in the political language of Russia,” he said. “We know their names. We know how they wrote our names and sent them to these Western embassies.” On another segment, he identified two of the fifth columnists: Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader now under house arrest, and Sergei Parkhomenko, an editor and civic activist who called for sanctions against those responsible for state propaganda.

Parkhomenko didn’t see the program when it aired; a friend told him about it afterward. “I found it on the Internet and watched only these five minutes,” he told me. “Physically I can’t endure any more, literally. It’s impossible to look at this horror,” he said of Kiselyov’s performance. “It’s really quite rich material for a psychiatrist: all the mannerisms, movements, endless grimacing, exaggerated gesticulation, some kind of howling intonation.” But he also recognized the seriousness of being singled out by someone seen to channel the will of the state. “Of course it’s a threat,” he said. “A large number of people who serve the regime will perceive this as a direct order.”