14 April, 08:34
The Tyumen region has allocated $2.3 million for VPN services. Murmansk — $230,000. Saratov — $163,000. Across several Russian regions, nearly $3.5 million in public funds have been earmarked for one purpose: allowing government officials to access the internet that those same officials blocked. Read that again. Slowly.
Because "the state" here is an abstraction — a convenient one, designed to prevent you from thinking about who actually pays. The people who pay are Russian citizens. They funded Roskomnadzor — its staff, its hardware, its ever-expanding registries of banned resources. They paid for the blocking itself. And now, from the same pocket, they are paying for the ladders to climb over the wall their money built. This is not governance. It is a perpetual motion machine for budget absorption, where the only product is the process of absorption itself.
In the economics of losses — the framework that best describes Russia's management model over the past two decades — the system's profit and the state's profit are not merely different. They are opposites. The state loses; the system earns. The more expensive any function becomes, the more lucrative it is for those who administer it. Internet censorship is not a policy. It is a business process.
Look at the numbers differently. The $2.3 million Tyumen has allocated for VPNs is not the cost of a software subscription. It is the cost of a system in which Roskomnadzor employs people, buys equipment and develops blacklists on one side — while the region hires a contractor to circumvent those same blacklists on the other. Both processes are budget-funded. Both generate procurement cycles, contracts, and disbursements. Both are entirely pointless from the standpoint of any final outcome — and perfectly logical from the standpoint of financial flows.
On April 1st, Telegram was blocked in Russia. VPNs, according to open-source reporting, are next in line. Meanwhile, the military-propaganda ecosystem that Telegram had sustained for three years is responding in an unexpected way: with each passing month, it grows measurably more anti-war. This is not a paradox. A man who yesterday considered himself a heroic Z-blogger suddenly discovers what his country actually looks like — through the very restrictions designed to prevent that discovery. Censorship has proven a more effective counter-propaganda tool than anything the opposition ever produced.
The Kremlin, apparently, understands this no better than it understands its own budget logic. Why block Telegram when every one of its users is already known, registered, and fully available for other measures — that question remains unanswered. The system does not optimise for outcomes. It reproduces itself.
The most precise description of this construction is not economic or political. It is anthropological. Over twenty years, Russian bureaucracy has evolved into an organism with no purpose beyond its own metabolism. Every tender is a feeding ground. Every legislative contradiction is an ecosystem. Every absurdity scaled to federal level is proof of the system's vitality.
Three and a half million dollars on VPNs is not a scandal. It is not an exposé. It is simply the latest cross-section of the norm — the norm of a country that pays to break things, then pays again to fix what it broke. Both times, from the pockets of ordinary Russians.