The Russians are a very fatalistic people. They're highly aware of everything that goes on. They don't know the details, necessarily, but they know the general.... They can see it for themselves. They were supposed to have gotten a billion dollars to build a road, and there's no road. The hospital that was supposed to buy new machines doesn't have any machines.
Everybody knows this is going on, and they're infuriated by it. Any person who would ever run on any ticket to change the corruption, to stop it, would win in a landslide, if they were allowed to run. The Russian government does what it did to Sergei Magnitsky, though maybe not quite as extremely, but in a lot of different ways and to a lot of different people. Everybody is afraid to speak up about it. Everybody is afraid to do anything about it, so they're subjected to it.
That's what a corrupt authoritarian regime does. It scares its people. It steals, and then it scares its people away from saying anything.