Until now what I have found interesting with Russia is that regular Russians have enjoyed a lot more freedoms than say Chinese people.

China has been willing to go much further in oppression of their own people. Yet Russia tends to use far more visible brutal tactics against regime critics than China. China would say arrest a teenager for throwing paint on a poster of Xi, and they make dissenters "dissapear."

In Russia however critical journalists get thrown out of a balcony. Dissenters get poisened with Polonium. The rulers operate far more like gangsters than the Chinese.