•Russia under the czars had political power centered on individual men and women.
•Then the country experienced a huge populist revolution only to see power almost immediately centralized in the hands of a series of leaders or strongmen.
•Most recently, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia adopted democratic elections only to find power concentrated, within just a few years, in the hands of one man.
What about Russia, or what external factors, makes this so?
Note: This is not a critique of Russia, but an earnest question, and I invite contributors to correct any of my premises.
This is something of a bugbear of mine and I get slightly angry when someone takes the likes of Richard Pipes too seriously. So I'll try to keep this brief and to the point. To be blunt: I don't think that there are any such cultural/other factors that continually produce autocracy in Russia. The assumption that there is is mistaken, IMO, on three counts:
It contains the implicit assumption that (Western) democracy is the default and that failure to achieve this is a deviation from the norm. The reality is that Russia is no different from most countries. Sustained democracy has only really existed in Europe for the past century and a half; outside of here and North America it has thrived in few places. I don't want this to come across as 'whataboutism', instead it's questioning why we should assume that there must be some factor(s) preventing countries from becoming democratic, as if that were natural or inevitable.
Secondly, there's nothing about the various Russian autocratic regimes that can't be explained by the conditions of the time. If people want to look at the rise of Stalin then the discussion should be about the conditions of the 1920s, not 18th C absolute monarchs. There's no need to search for a common thread from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin to Putin. Those histories that attempt to do this typically require simplifications and distortions to make the comparison between regimes work.
It ignores the evidence to the contrary. For example, to take an area of interest to me, the Russian Revolution of 1917 saw an explosion of writing and agitation that favoured a democratic and egalitarian republic. Any account of the times imparts a profound sense that Russia was on the cusp of creating a country in which people could be truly free. That didn't happen obviously (see point 2) but there was certainly no sense that Russia was bound to be an autocracy or innately conservative. Treating Communist authoritarianism as a direct descendant of Muscovite absolutism just ignores the period (however brief) in between when contrary aspirations dominated. Ditto Putin and the USSR.
Ultimately, I don't think there's anything unique or special about Russia. Nor is there much to be gained by looking for common, and inevitably fuzzy, cultural factors that span centuries. Russia was once one of many monarchies, it wasn't the first Enlightenment revolution to produce a dictator (take a bow, France) and it certainly isn't the only authoritarian capitalist 'democracy' (say hello, Nigeria, Singapore, etc). Its history is more or less in line with that of many/most other countries. Compare, for example, the past two centuries of Russian and Mexican history.
(Sorry marco if that comes across a bit strong. As I say, it's a topic that gets to me. This is largely because, much as Germany has its sonderweg, there's a school of historical thought that stresses the continuations between the Russian regimes and ascribes this to cultural or intellectual factors. I've already mentioned Pipes. I strongly disagree with this notion that Russia is somehow fertile soil for autocracy.)