It’s as if the city had been invaded by a horde of aliens with flamboyantly bad taste. Photograph by Alexander Miridonov/Kommersant Photo/Getty

The center of Moscow changed gradually in the course of the past week. First, a few oddly shaped glass arches popped up along the central avenue, Tverskaya. They were vaguely reminiscent of eggs, or the outlines of eggs, with some decorative curlicues on top. Then pastel-colored eggs, slightly smaller than a person, began appearing, and then they sprouted rabbit ears. Across the street from Moscow city hall, tiny—but still huge—replicas of various churches, including Russian Orthodox and Armenian cathedrals, were plopped down. By Thursday, Moscow bloggers and journalists began asking questions. One checked the city's official purchasing register and learned that the decorations were part of something called the Moscow Spring Festival, and that they had cost the city roughly three million dollars. By Friday, the entire center of the city was covered with sculptures and installations, most of them far larger than life size. These included a plastic reproduction of the classic Russian painting “Bogatyrs” (featuring three Russian-superhero horsemen), the size of a two-story house; the head of a woman—also roughly the size of a house—in faux topiary, with a twisted hand growing out of the ground next to it; and a cartoon Soviet policeman, which was the height of a small apartment building. It was as if the city had been invaded by a horde of aliens with flamboyantly bad taste. The Moscow intelligentsia recoiled in horror.

The aesthetic assault is a logical part of Moscow's—and Russia's—political progression. Until about a year or two ago, Moscow, at least its central part, had spent half a decade or so refashioning itself as a town of hipsters. Its pose was a highly stylized recreation of Soviet life, as represented by old black-and-white films. Places like Gorky Park had been cleaned up and filled with faux Soviet shops and beach chairs, in order to create some magical Soviet land of peace and plenty, complete with artisanal sandwiches and WiFi. But peaceful as the hipsters were, they were also unmistakably Western and urban—precisely the demographic on which Putin blamed the mass protests of 2011 and 2012. They have been swept out of city government and its cultural institutions.

The new decorations, which include at least a dozen replicas of generic Soviet statues featuring young pioneers and athletes, harken back to a different Soviet legacy. The distinguishing characteristic of Soviet art and culture in the second half of the twentieth century was not so much its ideological content as its crude form: art was required to be accessible to everyone at first glance. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, then the secretary-general of the Communist Party, attended a large, officially sanctioned show of contemporary visual art, and railed against it by calling the artists “faggots” no fewer than eight times. To the extent that his insults could be interpreted as criticism, it was directed at the insufficient realism of the paintings. The show was dismantled and many of its participants were, like Ely Bielutin, gradually forced underground, or, like Ernst Neizvestny, into exile. The next large-scale group show of contemporary visual art was attempted in Moscow twelve years later, on a vacant lot, and this time the authorities used bulldozers to shut it down.

The situation was replicated across the arts: if writing, theatre, film, music, or architecture was not predictable and primitive, it was deemed “alien” and blocked or shut down. The current Moscow Spring decorations, eclectic as they may seem, with their mixture of themes, styles, and materials, have this in common: they are created for a public whose aesthetic senses have been profoundly dulled. To them, the hipsters, with their stylish nostalgia, are as strange as the “faggots” of the nineteen-sixties were to Khrushchev.

On Friday afternoon, Russian tourists were taking pictures near Red Square, in front of the three enormous plastic horsemen. These visitors from the small towns of Russia liked the sculptures very much. They told me that they thought they looked festive and beautiful. This was another way in which the change in Moscow's look matched a change in its outlook. As recently as a year ago, this area was covered with small stalls selling souvenirs for Western tourists: fur hats, nesting dolls, and hokey McLenin T-shirts. A few months ago, there was a marked shift in the merchandise on sale here and in other tourist vacation spots: everyone was selling T-shirts with Putin on them: Putin looking menacingly over his sunglasses, Putin and a tank, Putin cradling a tiger, bare-chested Putin, smirking Putin, and all other extant varieties of Putin. In December, I took a picture of an airport vending machine that was called a “Patriot Box” (in English), selling, exclusively, menacing-Putin merchandise. One had to wonder if this selection of souvenirs was meant as an insult to foreign tourists, or if foreign tourists were assumed to have mobilized behind Putin, like Russians, or to have exoticized him enough to want to wear his bare chest on their own.

The number of foreign tourists has been dwindling ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, more than two years ago, and now there are almost none left. The souvenirs are mostly gone, too. In their different ways, the fur hats and tanks were addressed to outsiders. The giant horsemen and the miniature cathedrals are meant for a domestic audience. After a period of external aggression, Russia is turning inward—you can see that on television broadcasts, which have stopped railing against Ukraine and even the United States, and are instead focussing on protecting Russian children (mostly from pedophiles and drugs) and preventing Russian crime (mostly pedophilia and drugs). Entrepreneurs and the bureaucrats who manage them—two groups that live by being supremely sensitive to the Kremlin's shifts of tone and focus—have adjusted. This period of inward orientation may prove short-lived—Russian politics have a way of zigzagging—but, if it lasts, the differently minded are likely to find a lot more than just their senses assaulted.