Russia is growing more rigid and intolerant by the day under President Vladimir Putin. Last month, his Parliament moved to tighten control over Internet sites, protesters and nonprofit organizations. On Monday, three singers in a punk-rock band went on trial in Moscow for the Soviet-sounding charges of “hooliganism” after they sang an anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral. On Tuesday, Russian prosecutors leveled what appear to be trumped-up charges of embezzlement against Aleksei Navalny, one of President Putin’s most nettlesome and charismatic critics.

Mr. Navalny’s case is particularly disturbing in a country where laws are too often enforced selectively by those in power. A leader in the widespread anti-Putin protests that erupted in December, Mr. Navalny is well known as an anticorruption activist whose blog routinely uncovers potential wrongdoing at the highest levels.

Only last week, he accused Aleksandr Bastrykin, a top Putin aide and Russia’s chief federal investigator, of misleading parliamentary investigators about whether he maintained secret real estate holdings in Europe. The blog called Mr. Bastrykin “a swindler, a fraud and a foreign agent.” A few days later, Mr. Bastrykin’s prosecutors charged Mr. Navalny with organizing a scheme to steal timber from a state-owned company while he was an unpaid adviser to the governor of the Kirov region. It was an old charge, investigated and dismissed earlier this year. Regional investigators even told Mr. Navalny that he would be reimbursed for his legal expenses. But the Putin forces retooled the case to make the charges more serious. If convicted, Mr. Navalny could serve up to 10 years in prison.

Mr. Putin’s government has demonstrated once again its creativity in finding ways to silence opposition. The surprisingly large anti-Putin protests in Moscow on May 6 have led to formal charges against 16 people, 13 of whom are now in custody, on various charges; Mr. Navalny has said that he believes the protests were another reason Mr. Bastrykin crafted these new charges.