Despite an insufficient understanding of democratic practices, Russia today has tens of thousands of civic organizations defending civil rights. A 2012 survey from the Pew Research Center showed that a majority of Russians support honest elections and a fair judiciary. The Russian people want their voices heard and their leaders held accountable: They want a different political system.

To avoid the mistakes of the past, we need to determine why Russia’s two attempts to establish democracy in the 20th century led to new authoritarian regimes. In both cases, having overthrown one tyrant — the czar in 1917 and communism in 1991 — Russia ended up handing over power to another.

How did this happen?

At the beginning of the 20th century, conservatives and liberals were unable to find a common language to discuss a democratic foundation for Russia. As a result, the most reactionary faction within the governing elite came to dominate after the revolution of 1905, stymieing the development of democratic reforms.

After the overthrow of the czar in 1917, democracy once again lost out. The Bolsheviks were in essence just as autocratic as the reactionaries who came before them, only with the opposite “ideological polarity.” They may have managed to swap the minus and plus signs in a few places, but the Bolsheviks were never able to break free of the magnetic field of Russian authoritarianism.

History repeated itself with the rise of Boris Yeltsin, even though he was Russia’s first popularly elected leader. In the early 1990s, the new president was granted extraordinary constitutional powers, with victorious liberals referring to Mr. Yeltsin as “czar.” When Vladimir V. Putin was first elected president in 2000, the former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel inherited a system perfectly designed to sustain Russia’s authoritarian traditions.

A significant part of the Russian opposition today, unlike opposition movements in the West, sees democratic rights as emanating not from balanced political representation, but from the appointment of a “good czar.”