Eric Newhill
New
No, the Russian government is as much pro-Covid-1984 as any else; it is just the relationship between government and the populace that is different in Russia.
If a government makes a law in the West, people are either following it or publicly rebelling against it. In Russia, they are just ignoring it, persisting in going their own way, no matter what the government demands. And government largely allowed them to do it.
The reason is, the modern Russian society is based on a kind of silent ceasefire agreement between people and their rulers: the rulers are not actively messing in the people's private lives - as long as people are not rising against them publicly. So, if one opposes the government in a public sphere, like a small number of Alexei Navalny's followers, one will quickly feel a full might of a state's repressive mashine. But as long as one violate government's decrees in a non-demonstrative, private manner, one will be left alone.
The same goes for all kinds of, to say it so, deviance - from sexual, like homosexuality or BDSM, to religious, like following a new or non-traditional religious movement. The general principle still applies: you will be allowed to engage in a deviance of your own choice, as long as it is not publicly brazen and demonstrative. So, for example, you may live and love in a gay way as long as your keep your sexuality in a private sphere; but, if you try to become an open gay activist or organise a Gay Pride Parade, you will face quite unpleasant consequences. Or another example: while sex work is formally illegal in Russia, it actually has a flourishing sex work industry, which does not even try to hide itself, just does not announce itself loudly and proudly. But sex workers' activism is not something one would want to be engaged in... Or: there are a lot of people in Russia whose religious views are non-traditional in nature, and they are allowed to keep them as long they are not too publicly annoying. Jehowah's Witnesses and Church of Scientology were, so they are officially illegal in Russia, while many other new religions keep a low profile and thus tacitly allowed.
So, this is what makes modern Russia a classic authoritarian - but not totalitarian! - country: it strictly controls the public sphere, but allows a notable degree of freedom in the private one. To the contrary, modern Western countries are becoming totalitarian - in the sense that they increasingly erase the difference between public and private spheres, and wish the latter to be no less, in fact, even more controlled than the former; SJW and political correctness, absent and quite unthinkable in Russia, is exactly about that - making personal political, and intrusively regulated both by the state and tacitly state-approved vigilantes.
Russia is more free than America and Europe are rapidly becoming. The new American rulers - a combination of deep state and global corporations, especially big tech (= true racism) - since they architected the demise of Trump, want to own and control everyone. They will mess with our private lives and even try to penetrate our very thoughts with serious sanctions for anything unauthorized. Right now those sanctions are up to and including loss of emplyment and social ostracizing. I fear they will become more serious in time. Maybe brown shirt thugs showing up at one's home to physically assault or kill. It's very close to that already.