There was nothing, yes. But if Austalian mail providers joined the fray, the same excuse would apply to them as well. At what point does it become "genuine" censorship on your scale? Even in China, there are ways to get past the firewall, so if the ability to pass information somehow is sufficient to have freedom of speech, then China has that.
The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.
My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.
The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.
My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.