Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.
That's just sad.
Russia? Not so much I think.
Well, and only in America they believe such naive things.
For one, Russian people voted predominantly for Putin. The "dissent" you mention is mostly the US promoting some of his political rivals, feeding them (you nailed that one) and over-playing them for western audiences, so as to make a big fuss out of nothing to try to influence Russian policy for its own purposes. That's 90% of the "active dissent".
And China is a world player. They want (and deserve) their own Google or Twitter, not to be tied to externally controlled services. (Of course people whose own country is doing the controlling will disagree). Those kind of actions enable local players to sweep the market (why send control of internet search and ads to Mountain View?).
It definitely feels like a lose-lose situation for liberty when governments can pressure websites to censor at the risk of a total block.
Google is currently working on a crowdsourced proxy called uProxy in order to push back against censorship. If uProxy succeeds, it will no longer be necessary to meet censors half way.
As much as it sucks that Twitter is forced to do this, the government of neither Russia or Pakistan has a legal system which I would trust to fully respect the rule of law in this matter--either is likely to simply block the service if the requests are not acknowledged.
As principled as Google's stand was in refusing to pull an offensive video, it probably did more to stifle the free flow of information than had they pulled the "offensive" video on request. At least that way people would have an idea of which specific videos the government didn't want them to see, rather than the entire site being blocked out.