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The culture that supported the Imperial Czars for so many centuries, supported the Soviet Czars from 1917/22 to 1991, the weak interregnum of Yeltsin, Kuchima & Ledbed (Putin as Vice President), and the mobocracy of Putin since 2000 (with Medvedev giving a “democratic show” from 2008-2012 as “President” while Putin (Prime Minister) still held the power).

As the Soviet Union was felling apart, under Gorbachev, only two institutions in Russia remained intact and in charge of themselves - the KGB and the Russian mobs (which did not die during the Soviet Union). What has happened since the Soviet Union ended is that the KGB & the mob built their own version of the Russian political culture of authoritarianism, on the ashes of the Soviet union just as the Soviet Union did on the ashes of the Russian Imperial Czars. In truth the name of the game and the faces have changed, but Russian political culture and what of it the population accepts and/or tolerates has not changed all that much.

Some background supporting what I said:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/18/how-he-and-his-cronies-stole-russia/

Some quotes from it:

“In 1994, then-President Boris Yeltsin called Russia “the biggest mafia state in the world,” referring to “the superpower of crime that is devouring the state ...

[my comment: It began before he took power. The “powers that be needed the weak Yelstin for a period, so they could consolidate their interests before actually showing their hand.]

“In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they [KGB and some party bosses concerned not so much with Communism by THEIR loss of power] successfully plotted a return to power under the nose and with naive assistance from Yeltsin. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.

Using this mass of evidence, Dawisha nevertheless argues that the KGB’s return to power begins not in 2000, when Putin became president, but in the late 1980s. At that time, the then leaders of the KGB, who distrusted Gorbachev, began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers. At least initially, these transfers took place with the Party’s knowledge. In August 1990, the Central Committee called for measures to protect the Party’s “economic interests,” including the construction of an “invisible” structure, accessible only to “a very narrow circle of people.” KGB operatives who already had experience with managing foreign bank accounts—they’d been funding foreign Communist parties for decades—were put in charge.

By the autumn of 1991—after the KGB-led coup in August to overthrow Gorbachev had failed—almost $4 billion belonging to the Party’s “property management department” had already been distributed to hundreds of Party-, Komsomol-, and KGB-managed banks and companies that were swiftly establishing themselves in Russia and abroad. This was an enormous amount of capital in a country that had, at the time, a scarcely functioning economy and hardly any foreign currency reserves at all. In due course, these funds, and the people who managed them, were to become the real foundation for the economy of post-Soviet Russia. Again, this was not robber baron capitalism, or indeed capitalism at all: instead, a small group was enriched by the state and thereby given the means of acquiring its property.

From the very beginning, Russia’s current president had a part in this process. In the late 1980s, Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany. There are conflicting accounts of what he was doing there. In his official and unofficial biographies, Dawisha writes, quoting Putin’s German biographerAlexander Rahr, this period is covered in a “thick fog of silence.” But there is some evidence that he may have been helping the KGB prepare for what it feared could be the imminent demise of the Soviet empire. Indeed, when he became president in 2000, German counterintelligence launched an investigation into whether or not Putin had been recruiting agents who would remain loyal to the KGB even after the collapse of communism. As Dawisha explains, “the Germans were concerned that Putin had recruited a network that lived on in united Germany.”