I do concede that throughout the era post the fall of western Rome, monarchies have a long history of being predominantly effective and only in the minority despotic, but despite that homage to our departed colleague bChan, we have to look at the point of the article — democracy does not dispel tyranny.
I can imagine a bad king here and there, but I am still at a loss why any of them was "despotic". I can certainly name a few anti-royalists that cannot be describe in any other way, e.g.. Cromwell. Do you have a concrete example of a "despotic king" in mind?
Thank you, however, for conceding the larger point: that throughout Christian European history monarchies largely worked and democracies largely failed.
As to the post-Soviet space, the failure to rid of Sovietism (that is, the practical implementation of Communism in the Soviet Union) has many roots. Certainly, it is an impossible task for a democracy to do the job, if by democracy we mean that competitive and free elections are periodically held. To the Russian thinkers like Solzhenitsyn, emerging from the Soviet nightmare, "democracy" came to mean something vaguely associated with the social institutions of the West; I think he uses the word simply as an alternative to a single party rule.
What precisely failed in the post-Soviet space in Russia? Foremost, I think is the failure to cleanly and publicly condemn Communism, ban ex-communists from positions of power and offer an apology to the nations of Western and Central Europe that the Soviet Union annexed or subjugated. If the act of national repentance had happened, the social fabric that we call rule of law: the government that protects rights, -- could have been established, and they would have become the focus of the national pride of the Russian people. Instead, as we know, the cult of the military victories in 1945 was promoted, and the national revival was stillborn in Russia.