Many Russians do generally care about communications privacy, many don't know a thing about how telcos work (so they're genuinely unaware on the whole matter), and many don't care about privacy as long as they're not confronted with privacy issues directly (i.e. their private conversations suddenly getting public).

I guess the average Russian citizen has enough fear left from the soviet era (or the current one for that matter) to know that it would be unwise to question how the government handle surveillance.