Comment by tsimionescu

That's a very bad example, as ordinary Russians lived MUCH better lives under the USSR than they did under the Czars, at least at that time. The Czarist empire was still mostly a feudal state, and most peasants lived with no education and no money, barely scraping by. Standards of living, while still much, much lower than what was achieved in Western Europe, were still much better than what came before.

Now, can we imagine a world where the Czar was replaced with a Western-style democracy, where the Russian population would have ended up much better than they did? It's possible, sure - but there are no guarantees.