Technology

They don't have the processing power (I think) and the competencies are below those of Chinese censors.

Russian culture has been aligning itself with European culture for centuries.

"Aligning"? I mean, most of the EU is not northwestern Europe either.

They watch western movies and tv shows, read western books, half of the memes they use are from anglophone internet, etc.

Yes and no, in general Russians don't know\use English too well, it's not like the Scandinavian countries, Russian-speaking space is big enough to be mostly using Russian.

They are much closer culturally to Europe than to China, even despite all the politics.

Politics are more about claiming to be some "non-degenerate" part of Europe or orthogonal to culture.

That aside, before the Mongols (the original central) Russia was just a weird backwater of Europe (with some dynastic marriages between pre-Norman English royalty and Russian princes, for example).

After the Mongols it was maybe too strange for western Europeans, but not for the east.

Since Peter it was LARP'ing as normal European monarchy, during Catherine's reign it kinda was one (not weirder or more despotic than Austria), after that it was just too agrarian and underdeveloped, but not particularly weird still.

The White movement was pretty proto-fascist, and their winning adversaries were LARP'ing after one bearded graphomaniac who called his ideas "German ideology". That particular period ended in the 80s and 90s with attempts to LARP after the USA.

EDIT: Forgot about the actual point of your comment:

2014 is when it started for real.

Nah, SORM with all the same arguments was legislated and, well, deployed much earlier, somewhere in the early 00s and I'm not even sure it started then. It was the cleartext web, if you remember, with unencrypted ICQ, unencrypted HTTP, unencrypted FTP and such things. Much easier to work in such an environment.

At first the laws were rather innocuous (protect the children and stuff). But with each year they were “improved” to become more and more oppressive. Putin is smart enough to realize that if you do it incrementally then there will be less protests and he will appear as a good guy, “protecting the people”. It was the same with “foreign agent” laws.

They weren't. Russian laws were quite surveillance-friendly to begin with in 1999, just in the 00s economy was on the rise and the state appeared benevolent, so everybody learned to ignore this.

And no, it's not about appearing a good guy. It's about making people protest as much and as earlier as possible to morally exhaust them.