I wonder if they’ll get ‘10ers’ (term from the “Gulag Archipelago)” when they return to Russia? Those were the 10-year labor camp sentences Russian soldiers got for surrendering to the Germans in WWII. I think Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn got one.
Solzhenitsyn got his gulag sentence for making a remark critical of Stalin in a letter he sent home.
I think Russia has modernized some, the internet, phones, TV, travel, their young are a little like the Western young and I don’t think the government will totally crush them like the old 1940s Russians did and would, because they just can’t be so excessive today without all kinds of push back from the people
I get the impression that the brutality and cruelty of the Russian establishment are relative to the times and what they can pull off in today’s climate, they probably do some of what they used to, but can only get away with doing it on a tiny scale, they can send messages and tighten the screws but they can’t take away a million people at once.