Another Russian here. 99% of usage of Tor and Bitcoin is Russia is to purchase drugs — darknet has almost completely replaced street dealers in the whole country, and there's an addiction epidemic going on. At the same time, most of drug trade in Russia has been managed by various branches of police and secret police (actual police, rosgvardia, fsb, fskn in the past), and large marketplaces are likely directly owned by them. So there's a huge monetary incentive to keep Tor network available, which I think is much more important to people in power than a dozen or so journalists and activists who might publish some anti-government banalities on some darknet forum that nobody (unfortunately, in my personal view) reads or gives a shit about anyway.

Russians at large know perfectly well that their media is censored and the government is corrupt. They just don't care.