Referring to all the past governments of Russia under the common label of "authoritarian" is a bit of a bias towards modernity, where liberal democracy is so common that it can be reasonable to put everything that's not a liberal democracy under one label. Russia has had an incredibly diverse set of political systems in the past couple centuries. Labelling them all as simply "authoritarian" doesn't really work in a historical context. Monarchism under the Tsars was a completely different government than the Leninist and Stalinist governments that succeeded it. Likewise, the current form of authoritarianism under Putin is unique.

There isn't really a good explanation except that Russia never adopted the liberal ideology that the West did and therefore didn't incorporate it in their government structure.

There are those who argue that Russia is an inherently conservative nation, one in which the population craves a strong hand and is apathetic or suspicious of democratic rights. That is, the Russian national spirit is innately undemocratic. This is probably most predominately articulated in academia by Richard Pipes; his Russia Under the Old Regime ascribes this to a combination of geography, Mongol influence and the overbearing weight of Church and state.

Personally speaking, I think this is bollox. The assumption that there is some sort of unmeasurable authoritarian political culture in Russia is deeply suspect. To borrow from an old post, I find fault with it on three grounds:

• 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. Similarly, we don't have to grasp for some Mongol imparted mentality to explain the disastrous shock capitalism of the 1990s. Those histories that attempt to construct a common thread from Ivan the Terrible to Putin typically require simplifications and distortions to make the comparison work.

• It ignores the evidence to the contrary. For example, 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 (for a variety of specific reasons, see point 2) but there was certainly no sense that Russia was bound to be an autocracy. People didn't flock onto the streets to or agitate in factories for a different dictatorship. Ditto with 1991, when there were mass hopes for a democratic state.

So I see no grounds for treating Communist authoritarianism as a direct descendant of Muscovite absolutism and a forerunner of Putin's sistema. There were unquestionably continuities between each regimes, as is inevitable in revolutions, but these were people, institutions, etc. We don't need to search for some nebulous 'authoritarian culture' to explain these regimes.

Glad I got that off my chest.

Well, one thing to keep in mind is that liberal democracy is still something of a new thing in the course of human history. America's own democracy is less than 300 years old. There are still quite a few other governments on the planet which haven't made the transition either. Russia has been slow to liberalize, but I don't think it's been long enough to call it an aberration.

I recommend the book Russians: The People Behind the Power by Gregory Feifer, written by a Russian-American journalist. He offers some hypotheses as to why Russia's attempt at democracy post-Communism failed.