Let’s start with the obvious: Russian President Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian bully who is bulldozing Ukraine today. He follows an unbroken tradition of illiberality. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, too, who emerged from the ruins of the USSR’s disintegration, was anything but democratic, a ‘monarchial presidency’ at best (Yeltsin had infamously got the Russian military to bomb and storm the Parliament).
The unsmiling cold war Soviet leadership, earlier Stalin and Lenin, or still earlier the monarchial Tsarist and the Princes of Ancient Rus’, were all varying shades of autocracy. Russia never had a working democracy. This does not necessarily make its governance amoral, only different – a difference that perhaps matters (or perhaps doesn’t) only to the Russians. But the euphemistic ‘West’ has always painted the Russian Bear to be the cold-blooded and stereotypical Ivan Drago of the Rocky series – former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, had called the USSR “the evil empire”.