Nearly three years after President Vladimir Putin’s return to the country’s top post, and a year after the annexation of Crimea , Russian authorities seem to have solved their liberal problem once and for all. Up until relatively recently, liberals were useful for a number of reasons: to imitate democracy and political process; to help let off steam; to retain, as strange as it may sound, some element of feedback.

But after the new low in relations with the West—unprecedented in probably the past 30 years—there is no need to imitate anything, including the existence of liberal parties, like Mikhail Prokhorov’s Civic Platform, which was recently abandoned by its founder. There is no need to pretend that whistleblower Alexei Navalny can exist as a legitimate political player; it’s enough to block his activity almost completely, besetting him for good measure with a criminal sentence. There is no need to be embarrassed about anything: On the contrary, the prosecution of the Bolotnaya demonstrators will always remind those who favor street protests what consequences could lie in store for them. And if the West has anything to say, the reply will come from Russian television—“senseless and merciless,” to borrow a quote from Pushkin. With the ranks now closed so tightly around a single person, the techniques for letting off steam have changed too: Say, the commuter trains have stopped running; out comes the nation’s leader with the words “Have you lost your minds?” and the trains start rolling again. Magic tricks at the request of the laboring masses. Superhero to the rescue.