That was Russia’s experience in imperial and Soviet times. As the Russian reformer Yegor Gaidar once summarized his country’s historical cycles, a ruler would go all out to “catch up and overtake” the world, especially in military technology, only to exhaust and alienate his people. After a tortuous collapse, the country would regroup and start the chase again.

Mr. Putin’s popularity is not accidental, nor permanent. After the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union, in which millions of Russians lost savings and jobs, he restored economic stability and a sense of worth. He reversed the sense of humiliation over the loss of great-power status and empire with showy Olympics, a focus on church and family values and most notably the seizure of Crimea, a proxy war in the Russian-speaking eastern provinces of Ukraine and the defense of Russia’s dictatorial ally in Syria. And through manipulation of state-controlled television, he has exuded a comforting sense of competence and confidence.

But the “make Russia great again” game works only so long as people have the stability and security they have longed for through a brutal and tumultuous history. Now the grumbling has begun, in several small but widespread protests, Mr. Higgins reported. And Mr. Putin and his lieutenants — many, like him, veterans of the secret services — know from personal experience that a state based on a coercive central power cannot survive without it.

Svetlana Prokopyeva, the journalist facing seven years in a labor camp for “inciting terrorism,” touched on these fears when she delivered a radio commentary last year about a teenager who had recently blown himself up in the headquarters of the Federal Security Service secret police in the northern city of Arkhangelsk. Ms. Prokopyeva said the teenager was acting in the tradition of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries whose avenues of peaceful protest had been shut off. The same fears were raised by the shaman detained in Siberia in September, and subsequently packed off to a psychiatric hospital, when he declared Mr. Putin a “demon” who needed to be exorcised.

These are only two of many dissident acts, but they stand out because they might have never become widely known had the authorities left the transgressors alone. But the publicity, and the warning it carries, is the point, as Lev Shlosberg, one of the few opposition politicians in Ms. Prokopyeva’s city, Pskov, noted. “Their logic is the same as terrorists,” he said. “They want to create fear.”