The creation of a virtually omniscient Kremlin may be less about enforcing active control of the social, political and economic space in Russia than it is about encouraging Russians in all walks of life to control and censor themselves.
It is not simply that there is no place for Russians to hide. Without clarity about where the red lines are for political and even economic behaviour, there is no way to hedge. One cannot carefully walk on the knife’s edge, when that edge itself is kept purposefully obscure.
From a book review by Samuel Greene on OpenDemocracy.net of The Red Web: The Struggle between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan.