First off I am curious as to why you link being cultured and civilized with democracy? Plenty of civilized societies are and have not been liberal western democracies. Europe for the majority of its history has been Queens and Kings, Lords and Masters, liberal democratic values are a rather recent development, Perhaps Russians just do not value the same values that Western democracies do, what makes you think Russians want a Liberal democracy, or want to develop one why is it uncivilized if they do not?
Our very own /u/International_KB has written several posts on this subject, of which this one is rather succinct and concise.
It should also be noted that there are historians of Russia that do argue for a degree of autocratic continuity and this is one of perennial topics within Russian/Soviet historiography. Some of these approaches are akin to Pipes's approach in terms of reducing things to the fatalistic weight of history, but other takes on continuity are more subtle. In his seminal essay "Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay," Alfred Rieber argued that a peculiar set of constellations prompted similar responses by Russian leaders that transected both time and ideological divisions. Rieber is worth quoting at length here because it does show a more fruitful way of looking at continuity:
An alternative approach is to identify those persistent conditions specific to the Russian context that over long periods of time confronted the ruling elites and the mass of the population with both a range of possibilities and a set of constraints in their dealings with other states and peoples. The adjective persistent rather than permanent suggests that these conditions are neither impersonal nor immutable [emphasis original]. It is possible to identify four of them as fundamental to an understanding of the origins and evolution of Russian and Soviet foreign policy: (1) relative economic backwardness in relation to Western Europe and later the United States and Japan; (2) permeable frontiers all along the periphery of state power; (3) a multicultural state and society composed of ethnoterritorial blocs; and (4) cultural marginality. Unlike the three myths [Rieber earlier identified three myths of sources of Russian conduct: drive for warm-water ports; Oriental despotism; pan-Slavism], these persistent conditions do not singly or in combination imply a predetermined outcome; they do not preclude choices. Nor do they argue fixed belief systems or institutions that cease at some point in history to respond to external stimuli. They share a set of characteristics that can best be defined as geocultural, that is, they relate to those aspects of human activity- environment and clusters of attitudes and beliefs- that change slowly over time and cannot easily be transformed by political authority no matter how omnipotent its claims.
In addition to being a rather elegant historical model (and this was one of Riebers's many strengths as a historian), Rieber's approach to continuity does not deprive Russian/Soviet leaders of agency and notes that there were alternatives to authoritarianism but various contingencies made the state more conducive to the formation of an authoritarian state.