Hours after Russia's state media regulator accused the popular news website Lenta.ru of extremism over a recent interview with a paramilitary commander in the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist group Right Sector, editor Galina Timchenko was fired and replaced with a man hailing from Kremlin’s mouthpiece, Vzglyad.ru. Most of Lenta's reporters have resigned in protest, writing in a farewell letter, “The trouble is not that we’ve lost our jobs. The trouble is that you’ve got nothing to read.”

This is not far from the truth. There are hardly any objective, professional media outlets left in a nation that possesses half of the world’s nukes. Lenta’s main competitor, Gazeta.ru, has already undergone a Kremlin-directed overhaul. The only independent TV station, Dozhd, was removed from all major cable networks in February and probably won't survive long. Multiple sources claim that the semi-independent Ekho Moskvy radio station is doomed. Three other news websites were officially banned on Thursday, along with the blog of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was placed under house arrest in February. Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov wrote on Friday, "The demise of lenta.ru ... heralds the introduction of comprehensive censorship on the eve of the Crimean referendum and the subsequent annexation of the peninsula. Twitter and Facebook are next in line."

Meanwhile, a draft law in the State Duma equates "anti-Russian" materials with espionage and betrayal of the state, which means editors may spend decades in prison for stories that contradict the official line. The bill has been shelved for now, but so were some of the most infamous ones of late—before they surfaced again and became laws.

One can clearly sense what's next by following government propaganda, whose main target these days is the "fifth column": journalists, opposition activists, and anyone else who dares to doubt the wisdom of President Vladimir Putin's decision to send troops into Ukraine. Here's how it works: First an "investigative" documentary appears on government TV, then the authorities launch criminal cases against those that the documentary targeted (as was the case with left-wing leader Sergey Udaltsov, now on trial on charges of organizing riots). It was the same in Stalin's times, when show trials were preceded by Pravda editorials pointing at "enemies of the people."

The occupied Ukrainian province of Crimea is now swarmed by international press that arrived in the anticipation of Sunday's referendum about its future status. But Crimea is a part of a bigger story: Russia is drastically changing course. Once a rather soft autocracy, it’s becoming a highly repressive and increasingly totalitarian state with an information firewall as efficient as the Iron Curtain. In a matter of months it will be a different country and only a tiny, extremely non-transparent group of people knows what the design is.