Myths about Russian democracy, mud and prison of peoples

Democracy in Russia is one of the hottest topics that arose after the collapse of the USSR. Were the prerequisites for democracy in domestic history, or from time immemorial the Russians lived exclusively under the fifth strong and cruel dictators, who destroyed any manifestations of free will on the root? Like any acute problem, the question of Russian democracy overgrown with a large number of myths. Say, the history of Russia has been saturated with a slave spirit since ancient times, the imperial ambitions of Russian rulers led to the seizure of independent territories, the planting of their orders there and the transformation of the country into a giant "prison of peoples". And the population, brought to the cattle state with total lack of culture and the absence of "European values", is vegetable in centuries of mud, ruin and unsanitary conditions.
In his bestseller, Vladimir Medinsky, based on a huge array of historical material, more than convincingly proves that all this is nothing more than fiction