The french revolution started a chain of events leading to democracies across europe. For some reason, Russian tsars were able to hold on to more power than oth

The french revolution started a chain of events leading to democracies across europe. For some reason, Russian tsars were able to hold on to more power than other monarchs, though they did concede some power. By the time their revolution came, it wasn't democracy that was trendy, but communism. This was bad luck for Russia, and partially happened due to Germany helping the communists prior to the revolt. The communist leadership took things in a pretty wretched direction and Russia was stuck with it for a while. To make sure further revolutions would not happen, Stalin did his famous purge of russian leadership, which crippled them prior to world war 2. Post soviet russia wasn't very good at democracy, the nation had been run by crooks and murderers for decades. Naturally, a soviet figure was able to take advantage of things. This was bad luck in part, but also not terribly unlikely. It's not exactly a tendency so much as that it's really hard to get to democracy from a non-democracy, and russia's handful of chances were characterized by some crazy autocrats being at hand to take things over at the right time