Russia has traded one form of tyranny for another. It's a very different type of tyranny, but for the average citizens, the results are not hugely different.
What a waste.
They've been doing that for well over a millenium. It's all they know.
>> Russia has traded one form of tyranny for another. It's a
>> very different type of tyranny, but for the average
>> citizens, the results are not hugely different.
Its more complicated than that and results vary between main cities and the provinces.
Compared to 1983 Soviet Union, private property exists and there is no restriction on influx of information/culture from abroad. I guess that matters Open dissent expressed by an average person would not be supressed, unlike in the USSR. It is only if you're a prominent journalist with potentially wide target audience, or a politician on a level any higher than local, or an "independently thinking" oligarch that you will required to co-opt into the Putin's system, or be curtailed by it if you refuse to be a part of it. In other words, if you have any kind of influence in Russia, political, material or otherwise, at a certain level of it you will be expected to "become a part of Putin Corp." Otherwise, your may find sudden challenges to your well being and life itself.
In the provincial and rural areas of Russia, however, the population is much more concerned with survival amidst the rotting local economies and remnants of the Soviet social infrastructure, than with abstract freedom of expression.