I've read some of Secondhand Time and it is in my subject area, so here are some thoughts, although I think I have to stress this is just my personal take.

I both agree and disagree with the OP. I think in some ways learning about the history of the 20th Century in general does lead to at least the conclusion that we cannot expect a general concept of "Progress". This is why Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in particular stand as such stark monuments in the history of the 20th century. This happened in a country that a few years or so before the Nazi seizure of power was (at least on paper) a relatively progressive democratic society, that was highly educated, with some of the best universities and artistic and scientific minds in the world, and was a major part of the world economy. While a lot of Weimar Germany's history has been reinterpreted in a "coming of the Nazis" narrative, in, say, 1928 they were an extremely fringe group that was losing votes and seats and had barely regained its legal status (it scraped 810 thousand votes in the 1928 German legislative election). What got the country (and subsequently the world) to 1933 - and 1939 - and 1941 - and 1945 were a series of catastrophes and contingencies that were not obvious or inevitable at the time.

As to specifically the Soviet experience as relayed in Secondhand Time, I think there's even more complications. I don't think the Soviet experience could happen anywhere, and I think it can be misleading-to-dangerous to make those assumptions. George Orwell is pretty much the household name he is (sorry Eric Blair) because of 1984, and much of what that book is trying to do is describe - in a fictional future - Orwell's understanding of Stalin's Soviet Union transposed to Britain. Much of this is also satire of World War II Britain itself (the Ministry of Truth is basically supposed to be the wartime Ministry of Information), but there are also things that Orwell didn't know or understand about the Soviet Union that warp using this book as a text to understand the USSR. A big issue is honestly with Newspeak - while there were big ideological and political reasons for how language was shaped and used in the USSR (historian Stephen Kotkin has referred to it as "speaking Soviet"), it also needs to be placed in the context of its time and place. The Russian language was seen as needing orthographic reform, and reforming national languages was by no means a project unique to Stalin's Soviet Union, or even communist states: Chinese and Turkish are some of the better-known language modernizations happening at the same time.

Anyway, I'm getting a bit off topic. Back to the USSR/Russia proper. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the area tends to do history hard - there are cultural, social, institutional, economic and historic reasons for this. While I'm not totally fond of using cycles in history, Stephen Kotkin (same historian as mentioned above) has talked about how Russian history (at least in political terms) does tend to go through phases of reform - stagnation - collapse - radical renewal. These aren't inevitable, nor are they the same each time. But there's enough of a sense of this kind of instability that average people in the region themselves expect it as at least a reasonable possibility - there is a reason capital flight has been such an ongoing issue in Russia since the early 1990s, because anyone with a decent amount of money would rather stash it abroad than leave it in-country.

And it's not exactly clear what will come next. I'll try to avoid breaking the 20 year rule, but I would note that Putin is 68 now - the same age Yeltsin was when he resigned, and not too far off from the age when Yeltsin (and Brezhnev, and Stalin) died. But there is no real sense of who or what will come next. It's very hard to not think of Après moi, le déluge.

But: that's not the same as expecting collectivization, or the Purges, or the gulags to come back. And this is I think where the role of a historian comes in. Because those events were in many ways specific to its time and place. The Soviet Union, let alone Stalin's Soviet Union, was not an obvious or inevitable outcome even in 1917, but was the product of breakdowns caused by the First World War, political crises, and a brutal Civil War that not only saw the Bolsheviks win but heavily shaped among the ruling Party and Government how they should rule. They were also a party dedicated to a view of history prioritizing industry and industrial workers, but who were ruling a vastly rural, agricultural and largely illiterate country. Which is to say that even the USSR of the 1920s and 1930s was not a USSR that still existed in the 1980s or early 1990s, when most of the population was urban, there was almost universal basic education, and a significant portion of the population had university education and also began to have a stronger sense of wanting a consumer society, and seeing how the Soviet version increasingly did not measure up to foreign versions.

Which is a very long way to say: catastrophes and dark periods of history absolutely can happen anywhere. I think that in a broad sense, historian Timothy Snyder captures this well in his book (based off of a Facebook post after the 2016 US election, I believe), that there are lessons to be learned from this, and that if we don't want such dark periods to come, we can't just assume that we're too advanced or the system works - we often need to actively work to stop these from happening. But I still think Soviet history in particular needs to be located in its proper country, time and place. There's nothing inevitable, or even likely, that those dark parts of history in particular will happen again there, or anywhere else.