It's not that you're wrong; it's that that I wouldn't be so sure that you're right about it.
Russia's leadership is not monolithic, and it's decisions are not rational. Some critics are killed even though they do not pose a significant threat. Some are able to continue their fight. Some have allies on the inside; some are said to actually be controlled by the government.
If anything, history of such politics teaches me that it's chaos all the way down and almost no one has the full picture, neither knows what he's doing.
This is the most important thing to understand: non-Russian media loves to persist a never-ending charade that the whole of the Russian government is a direct limb of Putin and controlled wholly by him, which is quite far from true. It makes for a good narrative though, and since the Russian government is perhaps closer to that model than others, passes by readers unnoticed.
There are very much parts of the Russian political elite that will use violent and coercive means outside their official mandate to silence individuals. Roskomnadzor isn't really one of those, and is mostly limited to spewing more things onto blocklists to the chagrin of ISPs and people who actually understand the internet.
More likely Telegram is unblocked because someone higher-up finally got around to telling Roskomnadzor to fuck off and stop being a nuisance here, since its order never succeeded in actually blocking Telegram and mostly served to disrupt access to cloud service providers (breaking other, non-Telegram applications) as RKN ineffectually tried to issue block orders for entire AWS and GCP network ranges. Other parts of the government clearly didn't care much about the order (they continued to use Telegram for official business after the block), and it seems like it was either RKN attempting to flex its muscles to impress higher-ups or an unsuccessful attempt to put pressure on Telegram that the government has finally given up on.
Russia's leadership is not monolithic, and it's decisions are not rational. Some critics are killed even though they do not pose a significant threat. Some are able to continue their fight. Some have allies on the inside; some are said to actually be controlled by the government.
If anything, history of such politics teaches me that it's chaos all the way down and almost no one has the full picture, neither knows what he's doing.