However Russia failed to suppress and replicate YouTube that is the only massively popular Western platform in Russia.
> It worked and most Russians are not on Facebook, twitter and reddit
As a Russian, it's the first time I'm hearing about it. Do you have a source? My impression was that the early local alternatives became more popular because they were better tailored to local realities (better localization, more detailed maps and suggestions etc.), it happened way before the government started slowing down some social networks in the late 2010's. For example, Google search initially failed to account for grammatical declension of Russian, and Yandex beat it by several years (i.e. Google would simply match words as is). Google Docs wasn't aware Ё is a letter and its spellcheck marked all words with it as a spelling error. Or when it tells you the best shop nearby to buy toothpaste is in Oklahoma. There was simply lack of investment in Russian localization because our market wasn't very important to the US. I was one of the early adopters of VK (Facebook's alternative) in 2006 and I remember Facebook wasn't even on my radar (I don't think I heard about it that much), a friend of mine simply sent me a link to VK, I got hooked and invited many more friends of mine. Zuckerberg visited Russia to promote Facebook in 2012 for the first time (the year they finally started a campaign to improve localization for Russia), but it was 6 years late. Youtube's alternative, Rutube, failed because they had nothing new to offer (in fact, I tried to use it, and it was a miserable experience) and Youtube was already widely popular. I honestly don't know why Twitter never took off here, no one uses it and there are no Russian alternatives either. What I want to say is that the local alternatives became popular long before Kremlin's crackdown on the Internet, it happened pretty organically.
Russia has throttled access to Twitter, listing pretty silly reasons, when really it was because they were in a lawsuit over Twitter not removing content they found objectionable. Here's a source for that: https://freedomhouse.org/country/russia/freedom-net/2021
I'd say Instagram is as popular. Not sure about other services.