Nearly as big as California but served by only a handful of mostly decrepit Soviet-era hospitals, the remote northern Russian region of Komi is a coronavirus petri dish for the horrors lying in wait for the world’s largest country. Amid growing evidence that the pathogen had already breached Komi’s feeble defenses, the local authorities moved vigorously last week to contain the crisis: The police summoned critics of the regional government to ask how they knew about an outbreak in a hospital at a time when officials in Komi were insisting nobody had been infected.

Among those called in for questioning was Pavel Andreev, the director of 7×7 Komi, an independent online journal that revealed last month how a surgeon in a Komi state hospital sick with Covid-19 had infected patients.

Mr. Andreev said the police officer who led the interrogation mainly wanted to know about a comment the media director had posted online that said, “It is impossible to trust the state, even in hospitals.” Mr. Andreev, who has not been charged or even asked to take down his post, said the encounter was not so much menacing as baffling: The cat is already out of the bag so “why waste time and energy on this?” he asked.

The police intervention was carried out at the behest of Komi’s health minister, who was fired last week for his mishandling of the pandemic. It highlights one of Russia’s biggest obstacles as it struggles to control the spread of the virus in its vast and often ramshackle hinterland: a lumbering bureaucratic machine geared first and foremost to protecting officials, even after they lose their jobs, not safeguarding the public or its health.