The latest crackdown on the press in Russia is the most severe in the last 30 years. At least 1,000 journalists and about 100,000 IT professionals have fled the country since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to Net Freedoms Project, Russia has become the country with the highest number of VPN application downloads worldwide. At the same time, at least 779 persons have been convicted of a criminal offense for their opinions, posts, and reposts. Russian media was mostly free at the end of the last century. What went wrong? What lessons can we learn from the 1990s? Is there any hope for the future of Russian journalism?