MOSCOW—The Indigenous people scattered across Russia’s Arctic and the Far East, hard-pressed by climate change and expansion-minded timber and mining interests, are on the verge of losing the one voice that speaks most clearly for them.

A court in Moscow earlier this month ordered the closure of a nearly 20-year-old advocacy group on the grounds that its paperwork was incomplete.

But the group’s allies say this is nonsense: that the alleged violation is nothing but a pretext, the final act in a long campaign by the authorities to silence the organization.

“It’s not a legal issue. It’s a political one,” said Rodion Sulyandziga, the director of the Centre for Support of Indigenous People of the North/Russian Indigenous Training Centre. “There’s a big conflict of interest between corporations and Indigenous people.”

For years, the centre has been holding seminars and training sessions on legal issues, economic development, pollution and climate change.

Sulyandziga said the shifting climate has already started to affect hunting, fishing and herding in the Indigenous areas, with more serious forest fires and floods. The group also monitored the actions of regional governments and major Russian companies and participated in international forums.

All this has inevitably drawn the hostile attention of the authorities.

“The centre is the most important Indigenous rights group in Russia,” said Grigory Vaypan of the Institute of Law and Public Policy, who represents it in court.

The court order comes as a new crackdown spreads across Russia, targeting advocacy groups, individual activists, theatres, art galleries — a wide array of voices that have one thing in common: They have all presented public opposition to the authorities, in one form or another.

The aim is “to frighten the society,” said Valery Solovei, a historian and political analyst. Bracing for more confrontation from a public that is beginning to stir, he said, authorities are trying to “extinguish” those civil society outlets that could become tribunes of protest.

Sulyandziga knows what it is like to be harassed, arrested and accused of abetting Western nations accused by the Kremlin of trying to thwart Russian economic development, he said. His brother Pavel left for the United States after his life was threatened.

Sulyandziga was unable to make a trip to a United Nations meeting in New York in 2014 when a border guard defaced his passport by cutting a page out of it.

This month’s court ruling is a death sentence for his organization unless it can be overturned on appeal.

“We are doing our job, according to the Russian constitution, which guarantees Indigenous people their rights,” he said.

But rights everywhere in the country, he said, are under harsh new attack.

Pavel Chikov, a lawyer who heads the Agora human rights group, said the wider crackdowns date to last summer, in the wake of street protests in Moscow over local elections.

Activities that were once tolerated have been abruptly subject to repression, he said. “Suddenly everything changes, and what was OK is now not OK. The unpredictability is very high, and the rules are changing all the time,” he said.

Meanwhile, the list of rights groups and others under pressure continues to grow.

This month, a venerable organization, For Human Rights was also ordered to disband.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation of opposition leader Alexei Navalny is under criminal investigation on a charge of money laundering and has been ordered to register as a “foreign agent,” which would drastically limit its ability to work. The foundation disputes the criminal accusation and has promised to fight the foreign-agent designation.

An organizer with the human rights organization Memorial, Yuri Dmitriev, is in jail facing child pornography charges, which he and his supporters say is concocted.

Memorial has been hit with repeated fines — about $10,000 in October and November for violating the law on foreign agents. Its branch in Perm was fined $3,000 in October for supposedly seizing forest land plots illegitimately when it organized a trip to a Stalin-era place of execution of Polish and Lithuanian prisoners.

On Monday in Siberia’s Kemerovo region, police charged an anti-corruption activist named Dmitry Miropoltsev with displaying Nazi symbols on a social media post. It was an image taken from state television.

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And last month, an art exhibit in Moscow called “Autumn of the Tough Guy,” which aimed to document the beatings of civilians in Moscow and St. Petersburg, was shut down before it could open — on President Vladimir Putin’s 67th birthday. The gallery’s doors have since been welded shut.

More recently, a children’s play taken from a story that was popular in the Soviet era, called “Cipollino,” by the Italian socialist Gianni Rodari, was banned in Moscow. It’s about a little onion that leads a revolt against the repression of Prince Lemon and Don Tomato.

A dormant criminal case against a renowned theater director, Kirill Serebrennikov, and several of his associates, who were charged in 2017 with embezzling nearly $2 million, was revived in late October. He has taken part in anti-government protests and been especially critical of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin. The accused adamantly deny the charges.

“I wanted to stage a play in Russia but couldn’t because the (theatre) administration decided that it was too political,” a young director, Alexander Molochnikov, said Tuesday on Dozhd TV, a web channel. “Well, you know, we won’t stage it, well, we can’t — we are financed by the government. This is self-censorship.”

Molochnikov said he is taking his play to Latvia instead.

Previously, said Vaypan, the Indigenous group’s lawyer, the government would at least try to show that an organization it wanted to repress had caused some harm.

But now, said Vaypan, “any NGO in Russia can be dissolved for any reason — for a missing comma.”

Sulyandziga belongs to the Udege ethnic group, who live in forest villages in Russia’s Far East, along the Bikin River. There are about 1,800 Udege altogether. They hold that the Amur tiger is their common ancestor.

Russia’s more than 40 Indigenous groups had no organization or anyone to speak for them until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They make up just 0.2 percent of the country’s population and rank near the bottom in income and life expectancy.

Between the censuses of 2000 and 2010, two Indigenous peoples died off: the Alyutors and the Kerek.

Sulyandziga said that Canadian Inuit groups had been especially helpful in teaching Indigenous Russians how to organize and advocate for themselves. Since then, his group has become a partner in various international Arctic organizations and has had access to UN forums, where its concerns about rights and the environment have been heard.

“The Arctic,” he said, “is a very sensitive topic for Russia” — important geopolitically and offering tempting economic boons.

A report co-written by Pavel Sulyandziga and presented to the UN in June noted that Russian authorities have been intent on the “criminalization” of Indigenous activists, hitting them with fines and jail sentences.

There’s no sign of that letting up, but “I want to think,” said Rodion Sulyandziga, “that we will continue.”

—The Washington Post’s Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.

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