The Russians basically struck an unspoken deal with their rulers, the deal a certain Thomas Jefferson warned about.
In order to understand this, you need to understand how the Russians dealt with the trauma of the 1990ies. In less than a year, from a drab yet safe existence in one of the two world’s superpowers they went stumbled into basically apocalyptic conditions.
Alongside the old Soviet Union pretty much all government functions collapsed, wages were in freefall, society broke down and a state of complete lawlessness occurred.
Wages for educated professionals went down to a few dozen USD, drug dealing gangs clashed in massive shootouts with AK 47 and sometimes APCs stolen from the Red Army, the country was in throes of an opioid epidemic, HIV/AIDS rates skyrocketed, murders and kidnappings were basically the only profitable industry. You basically couldn’t walk the streets of Moscow.
Not only that, but 99% of the population was not mentally prepared for the market economy. All career prospects, values and belief systems collapsed overnight. And the President Yeltsin was an alcoholic and a laughing stock of the world.
Enter Putin and his coterie in 1999 - the KGB crowd seized total power, started killing off/imprisoning opponents and offered the Russian population a grand bargain - unchecked rule in exchange for increased living standards. And it worked - high oil priced enabled between a quarter and a third of Russians to move from poverty into the middle class, the Second Chechen War and the killing of a quarter of the Chechen population restored some national pride.
Streets were cleaned up, both literally and figuratively (Moscow is much, much cleaner than NYC) and if you’re minding your own business, chances are you’ll never be exposed to street crime. Sure, “those brownish people” kill and stab each other in suburban ghettos and sometimes someone gets whacked mafia-style, but the general public is immeasurably safer.
Also, they enabled Russians to live in a society with all outward trappings of a free Western society. A middle-class Russian owns an IPhone and a Western car, shops at IKEA, drinks coffee at Starbucks, has all-inclusive summer vacations in Turkey or Egypt and in general lives in a Matrix style bubble comparable to the West, assuming he doesn’t cross over into the realm of politics where the real power and massive criminal organizations live.
Then all those nice facades suddenly drop and you’re confronted with the unrestrained dictatorship and it’s repressive apparatus. But most of the people accept the grand bargain of " prosperity and security" in exchange for looking the other way about massive corruption schemes and accepting they have no say in government matters.
