Wow, did anyone actually read what I've written. I think I have specifically said that Russians, like the other Eastern Slavs (and the Western Slavs for that matter) had love for freedom and a tendency for participatory models of government in their DNA.
HOWEVER, because of very specific facts of geopolitics, Muscovy has been pretty much forced to adopt several aspects of the Mongolian model. Since then, provably, there has not been much liberty in Russia, but Russia has gotten much stronger. These are facts. We'll see what the future holds but no one can tell me that for example everything even remotely close to the Novgorod model (or what the Novgorod model might have evolved into in our times) has taken place in Russia at any time sice ... I don't know Ivan III.
I've never said Russians are incapable of democracy or not ready for it, that's your own straw man argument. I've just said that the evolution of Russia's history has pretty much been a result of its geography and its geopolitical situation. I did say though that the Russian core is utterly indefensible without buffer states and that the climatic conditions in this core and the vastness of the territory (i.e. transportation costs, infrastructure needs etc.) make Russia a capital poor country. All that means that Russia, to survive in the form that it has, needs to be expansionistic and super centralised as a result. This does NOT mean that the rise of people such as Ivan IV or Stalin to rule it is a necessity, obviously those were accidents.