This year the majority of Russian elite did not go on vacations. At the beginning of his presidency, Vladimir Putin devoted himself to revenge all his winter enemies.
There was not a single day of this summer that went by without an anti-opposition event or measure. The campaign of repressions has been growing bigger and bigger, starting from a bunch of punitive laws in June and July and ending with some scandalous court sentences in August.

There were guilty verdicts, one after another. The State Duma turned into a machine for rubber stamping anti-opposition bills. There are an ongoing criminal prosecutions of Alexey Navalny, Gennadiy Gudkov, and other Moscow opposition leaders.

Anti-rally laws have already been tested, and it seems that they are not fully ready to be implemented, and will be useless as soon as the protest movement gets bigger.
The scandalous trials did not manage to gather people around the Kremlin, but instead have only split society. "The punk prayer" performed by Pussy Riot was not welcomed by many people, but the scandalous trail and the verdict triggered an unusual anti-establisment sentiment across society.
In theory, the Kremlin is capable of getting rid of many opposition activists, but this only will make the Kremlin look more authoritative.

In addition to all this, none of the "revenge-ism" has gained popularity or support. Revenge does not have heroes.

A very important feature of this summer campaign is that it has been imposed upon the bureaucratic class by the Kremlin, and people didn't ask for it. In fact, Vladimir Putin did not declare that he would put pressure on opposition during his election campaign. Instead, he promised material benefits for almost everyone, but he failed to do anything in that direction this summer.

It seems that this summer the authorities forgot about their real duties and plunged into what was interesting only for themselves. This has led to a decrease in their approval ratings.

The system suffers from numerous diseases, and all its efforts to hide the symptoms can only lead to new problems.