Russia Under the Old Regime by Pipes goes into this, as does A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes.

It would probably be broadly fair to describe Imperial Russia as more authoritarian than other regimes at the time, but saying 'Russia tends towards autocracy more' seems more cultural than historic.

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were splinters of a historic society called the Kyivan Rus, because they called themselves the Rus and their capital is in modern Kyiv. The bulk of the population were Slavs, but they had been conquered by Nordic people (Pipes called them "Normans") who were the political leadership. The rulers eventually were integrated into the Slavic population, but they were the founders of the original royal line of what became Russia. What's important to understand about this is that control of territory was inherited not like the British royal family, where Prince Bob inherits the crown and thus control from the dead King Bill, but more like estate inheritance. King Dmitry dies and his dominion is divided equally between his sons Dmitry Junior and Vladislav. They also did not originally control the population. The serfs could pack up and leave at anytime if they wanted. When the various Russian princes made alliances with each other, they usually included clauses about not restricting the movement of the serfs.

This process continued from 879 when Rurik (the founder of the dynasty) until the 1230's, leaving the Russian lands divided into a large number of statelets ruled by princes who personally owned the land and saw their main goal as the personal exploitation of it. What changed in the 1230s? The Mongols invaded!

The Mongol invasion of the Russian lands had two main effects that I think are relevant to this question. First, they largely united Russia. Not purposefully, but when the Russians under Ivan III finally expelled the Mongols in 1480, that was basically it. The Russian lands were heavily unified, and this was finalized under his son Vasily III and Ivan III's grandson Ivan IV, aka, Ivan the Terrible, aka, the first Tsar of Russia.

Second, it really shaped the common perception of government in Russia. Moscow in the initial invasion was not a terribly important or powerful territory. It became one because it was at a series of important crossroads, taxed people travelling along the roads, issues loans to other princes with their territory as the collateral (and yes, annexed those lands if the debtor could not pay), and directly controlled any important industry. It did this to pay the Mongol tribute. And any Russian prince who didn't pay the Mongol tribute was likely to be deposed, sometimes by the Mongols, and sometimes by another Russian prince on orders from the Mongols.

By the time Ivan IV became Tsar of all Russia, the idea that "government must be central, and powerful, and it exists largely to exploit people" was well established. There are stories Pipes recounts of merchants being unwilling to open new markets or start selling new goods in Russia because if they did, they were likely to be taken over by the state. The state would buy the good from merchants at a fixed price, then sell for a profit. And not profit for the state, profit for the Tsar. By the time of I believe Nicholas I, Russian merchants were so reluctant to start new industries, that the Tsar had to basically force them to run factories making materials needed for a modern professional army. Another example of this is from, I believe, Ivan IV was that a British monarch sent the Tsar a letter asking about establishing some kind of friendly relations. The Tsar responded that so far as he was concerned, the only true monarchs were the ones not answerable to anyone, and that meant him and the Turks, and no one else was a true monarch, so any sort of alliance with the British was beneath him.

Oh, also, the Tsar's directly controlled basically everything. Feudalism, atleast in Western Europe, was largely mutually beneficial. The duke gets legitimacy from the king and the assurance of support if attacked, and the king didn't have to deal with everything happening in the kingdom. But Russia wasn't like this. There was no real equivalent of nobles that were autonomous in their own regions who were part of a mutually beneficial relationship. There was a master, and there was a servant, and there was nothing else.

Nicholas II gives another fun example of the degree of the centralized control the Tsar's had. There are stories of him having to constantly mediate disputes between various administrators because their roles in the different departments (and the roles of the departments themselves) were vague and overlapping. And the Tsar wanted it this way because it meant they were dependent on him for direction. He also liked to do things like personally approve repairs on bridges or roads or get involved in all manner of things that no western king would bother with, because it meant he was the one exercising power.

In sum, by the time of the Russian Revolution, the idea was fairly established in the minds of people with political, military, and economic power that government was (or should be) authoritarian. The country was more-or-less founded by Nordic peoples who treated their Slavic subjects as property to be inherited, they were reunified by Mongols who rewarded the princes that were best able to economically exploit the land and its people, and from then until the Revolution, the Russian government was almost universally authoritarian, without checks on its power from church, lord, or merchant. And, it was run heavily for the personal profit of the Tsar.

None of what came after the Revolution was destined, though. The White Movement that was unified only by opposition to the Bolsheviks included a number of unreformed Tsarists and people who wanted what might be called a military dictatorship, but it also included liberals, and republicans, and democratic socialists. And the Reds also faced opposition from the Black Army, who were anarchists.

I have not read much about post-Soviet Russia though, so I won't comment beyond this: plenty of post-Soviet and post-Communist states are free democracies, so I don't think the authoritarianism of modern Russia was destiny either.

The history of the Russian autocracy is not very different from that of the continental European monarchies until the end of the 18th century. In both cases we have a very powerful nobility that is gradually ousted from power by the monarch who ends up becoming an absolute ruler. Louis XIV of France was no less an autocrat than Tsar Peter I.

This begins to change with the French Revolution. From 1789 onwards, albeit with strong resistance, European states were transformed in an increasingly democratic direction. Even in Germany and Austria-Hungary, where parliaments have little influence over the government, one can speak of constitutional monarchies: in essence, the king can no longer do whatever he likes, but must at least formally respect the constitutional charter.

This does not happen in Russia and, apart from the Duma of 1905 soon reduced to impotence, until 1917 the Tsar is considered the 'supreme autocrat of all Russia' and a bulwark of reaction.

Why? A cut-throat but acceptable answer is the lack of a bourgeoisie. It is the bourgeoisie the class that makes the French revolution and in the course of the 19th century pushes for more and more political power in a liberal perspective.

In Russia, on the other hand, society at the end of the 18th century was still divided into serfs and nobles and little changed a century later. When the Russian revolution arrives, very few want a democracy in the western sense. The reactionaries want to return to the Tsar, the Bolsheviks want the dictatorship of the proletariat. As we know, the latter will win and will be able to impose themselves on a country made up overwhelmingly of peasants.

Another problem: Russia is still an empire, in the sense that one ethnic core (the Russians) dominates over other peripheral ethnic groups and this is very difficult to maintain in a democracy. This was even truer during the Russian revolution: the Soviets have to choose between freeing the subjugated ethnic groups and seeing the empire disintegrate (as will happen in 1991) or maintaining control with an iron fist. As we know they chose the latter, although it must be said the Soviet Union was slightly less Russo-centric than Tsarist and Putinist Russia.

Finally, what happened after 1991 was that Russia fell victim to the resource curse to add to what has been said so far that remained mostly valid. As in Saudi Arabia, when a state obtains much of its wealth from natural resources, it is easy for it to become or remain a dictatorship. The government has no need to liberalise the economy to make it work better, because it stands on the extraction of gas and oil anyway. What's more, it has an immense amount of money at its disposal to distribute to the people to keep them loyal, without even having to raise taxes to do so.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)