@kaia
Even being Russian, I have no idea 😂
Serfdom is the only thing that comes to mind, but I'm pretty sure that's not what the conservatives like. In the media they are just aping what the US conservatives are up to: abortions for example, despite abortions never being the problem: if you look at the statistical data, the number of abortions have been steadily declining since the dissolution of USSR as contraception became widely available. The number of births have been growing in the 2000s as economy was on the rise. Now that the economic prospects are grim, fewer couples want to have babies. But US conservatives dig banning abortions and anti-LGBT rhetoric, so they do just that.
Same with religion: to US conservatives that might seem natural, but they are missing an important detail, this country was atheistic USSR just a few decades ago. I remember this very well: Orthodox Christianity being reinstated in the 90-ies. People can be religious — their right of course, but calling it traditional? Oh, come on!
You can't have traditional anything in a country with no traditions — where the traditions are almost completely rewritten every century, so they are making this mishmash of things from Russian Empire and Soviet History (in an attempt to appease the left-leaning crowd too, it mostly fails with everyone except ther tankies, and it's still a win as Soviet-era stuff is quite popular among older people domestically), and they call it Russian tradition. Unsurprisingly, some of these things fit together poorly, at times they are outright conflicting, so if you dig a little deeper, this eclectic… thing starts falling apart. But if you start asking questions, you are told to just love your country and by country they mean the state, and by the state they mean those who are currently in power, so yeah… it's basically serfdom.
Truth is, Russia never really transitioned to a nation state — it died as an empire, so political nationalism doesn't make sense here — it never really existed, whatever they mean by "nationalism" when they speak of Russia in the Western think-tanks is only an imitation of it. Same with socialism really: in the 30s Stalin started wrapping all the "progressive" things up and restoring them the way they were before with the Tsars. He even restored the Russian Orthodox Church in the wake of WW2 to boost the morale, but of course it was subjugated to the state — the way it was in the Russian Empire and the way it still is now. "Friendship of the peoples" is bullshit too. Left-leaning people in the West love the anti-colonial rhetoric and of course they attempt to apply that to Russia too, but they are doing it wrong. It might be true for Ukraine, but for many Central Asian ethnic majority republics it was the opposite — national cultures weren't being suppressed, but were nurtured during Soviet times, many of these ethnic groups didn't have extensive national cultures and they were vastly expanded, USSR was attempting to win people over with this — of course this was giving rise to local nationalism, by the time of the dissolution of USSR they had national elites and that is why they have mostly managed to split off cleanly.
Ukrainians, Belarusians and, it might sound surprising but, Russians were never given that privilege. And it's mostly the same way nowadays — Russians (by which I mean ethnic, Slavic Russians, not those who hold the passport of Russian Federation, who might belong to any ethnic group or culture) do not get any preferential treatment, they are being treated equally to everyone else — and this means equally bad. Numerous times I've seen comments coming from the far-right crowd that Russia is a White majority country and even something like that it's a hope for White Europe, which in their opinion is in decline. This is also bullshit of course — true, we don't have many Black people here, as in African Black. But that's not exactly whom the call non-white here. Muslim folk have their holidays right in Moscow, they occupy whole streets to pray to the point that traffic restrictions get imposed — and of course no one is persecuting them. Girls who get jobs in Central Russia and move here from their Muslim majority regions can get kidnapped by their families are forced to move back and marry the man of their choice — this is happening all the time and law enforcement does nothing: "Well, so is their tradition".
Other ethnic and religious groups are being tolerated and sometimes even protected. So how come? Easy — masters do not care what culture the serfs belong to as long as they obey. That's right — Russia is still feudal in nature, its society is in the stage of development that pre-dates nation-states. Under this angle the state capture by a small group is very easy to explain — it's natural!

@m0xee
cc @amerika @Hyolobrika