Furthermore, as an expat living in Russia at the moment, it is quite surprising to one day be in an EU country and able to access any wide variety of sites, and the next day get a friendly message from Роскомнадзор telling me this website has been blocked for my protection or some other non-sense.
I'm not involved in politics enough for it to be something very dangerous for me -- it's just non-sense things I want to see that I cannot because of silly regulators wanting to look important. But at the same time, trying to browse around via Tor to bypass these restrictions make it impossible at times to access information that Роскомнадзор has decided Russians shouldn't be allowed to access.
For those wondering, "Роскомнадзор" is Russia's "Censorship Agency", Roskomnadzor[1]. If you are wondering, why is there a Censorship Agency in a country whose Constitution explicitly bans censorship[2], well... Let's just say it's not the first time in our history. Probably not the last.
To be fair, a lot of times I feel that it's more Hanlon's Razor than active censorship. There still is a lot of Old World Russia running the show in Russia, and stuff you could pull off when the entire populous was farmers just doesn't really work now, and Russians are not afraid to call their leaders out on it. The problem is that there still is an overwhelming sense of apathy in the population, though this is steadily changing as more and more people become active politically, even if for now there isn't an immediate effect.
But a lot of things that agencies like Роскомнадзор do are simply because it made someone a quick buck somewhere down the line. Many of my friends/colleagues work for businesses run by old men who are more interested in 10,000 rubles now than 100,000 rubles in a week. The decisions that Роскомнадзор and other government entities makes rarely have much more of a thought process beyond a simple "well, we wanted X". When the Telegram ban came into effect and folks outside of Russia were flabbergasted by Russia's choice to just block major parts of AWS, people came up with the most outrageous of theories as to what was happening. The simple and more accurate truth was probably that whoever made the decision at Роскомнадзор to do the blocks neither thought about the implications of such a decision nor had the technical knowledge to really understand it, and those underneath this person likely didn't have the will or inspiration to care, hence why the block is so trivial to bypass (like all the other blocks)
Like with many countries, a lot of old political methodology has to die off before Russia can really step forward, and while that is happening, it's why projects like Tor are essential for providing unmitigated access, whether it is a malicious block (Telegram) or a senseless one. That so many US companies just have a straight up IP block on all things Russia doesn't help to advance the situation past this stage at all.
Any society wants some level of censorship, and tends to want it strongly enough to override any Constitution or similar document that says they should have it. Once the system is in place for the kinds of censorship that the majority of society wants, it becomes far easier for someone to expand it. Censorship is so nice when you are in power getting what you want censored that people don't consider what happens when the powers that be no longer represent their interest.
I'm not involved in politics enough for it to be something very dangerous for me -- it's just non-sense things I want to see that I cannot because of silly regulators wanting to look important. But at the same time, trying to browse around via Tor to bypass these restrictions make it impossible at times to access information that Роскомнадзор has decided Russians shouldn't be allowed to access.