From my understanding, if you have not or do not have a role in governance, or are not actively protesting the government, you can pretty much say what you want. Activists are pretty much barred from government, where, much like in the U.S. those that do get through are heavily coopted.
However, until recently they were honestly more relaxed than the U.S. is. Like the shit Pussy Riot did would have landed them on a sex offenders registry in the U.S. whereas they just went to jail for a couple of years in Russia. Putin is a bad and corrupt oligarch, and yet still America manages to be more repressive because it has so much money to throw at it's systems of repression.
I think it has more to do with the amount of extraneous capital they have to throw around than time, as most of the real surveillance state apparatus was built in the U.S. post 9/11, but the lack of continuous government in Russia probably didn't help them in that particular endeavor.
From my understanding, if you have not or do not have a role in governance, or are not actively protesting the government, you can pretty much say what you want. Activists are pretty much barred from government, where, much like in the U.S. those that do get through are heavily coopted.
However, until recently they were honestly more relaxed than the U.S. is. Like the shit Pussy Riot did would have landed them on a sex offenders registry in the U.S. whereas they just went to jail for a couple of years in Russia. Putin is a bad and corrupt oligarch, and yet still America manages to be more repressive because it has so much money to throw at it's systems of repression.
tl;dr: Russia is less shitty than America because they've only had a couple decades to build systems of mass suppression instead of hundreds of years
I think it has more to do with the amount of extraneous capital they have to throw around than time, as most of the real surveillance state apparatus was built in the U.S. post 9/11, but the lack of continuous government in Russia probably didn't help them in that particular endeavor.