The degree of distinctiveness of Russia from the West is due to the Orthodox church and religious wars and conflicts it implied (including Crusades) and the fact that till 40-50ies of the XX century Russia remained a peasant country. So, the cultural background is different and simular stages, like industrialization, were passed at different points of time.

While it's really an interesting topic and explains many disconnects between Russia and Europe at different history points, I'm not sure it's directly relevant to the discussion of the alleged ingrained Russia's predisposition to authorism as opposed to the collective "West". One of the problems is that "West" now is quite different from the "West" from 500 hundred years ago, and I'm afraid, the majority of the "West" countries now will not stand to the high, most ideal standards, being presented to Russia in the MSM. Here I'm not talking about US: US is already there by the MSM definitions. Another issue is the communist rule, which had a major disruptive effect on the collective psyche and social organization in Russia. In short, in order to understand the current state of affairs, you don't need to look beyound the starting points and events in/of 100 years ago. The economic side is even simplier: it started 15 years ago.

Few interesting tidbits about peasants:

Roughly speaking (minus state  and church lands and all the rule changes for those in between), the original arrangement was that there was a warrior, later feudal/aristocracy, class which owned the land and derived profit from it but had a duty to serve the state (1760+ military and state service for them was mandatory) and a peasant class working the land. Always there was a clear set of laws governing relations of czar and nobility and nobility and peasants.

Peasants working the land had to supply a percentage of their crops/profits to the landlord and till about 1500 were free to change a landlord at any time, after that only in two specific weeks a year and by 1600 they were bound to the land completely.

The peasants worked as communities, all the decisions being adopted on the consensus basis and mandatory for all community members. Few of the important aspects include the believe that land belongs to the community and no individual has exclusive right to it (this perception in large part is true to this day) and that community, as a collective, is responsible for working all the land and providing nobility their taxes even if some members of the community leave.

After 1600, when peasants were prohibited from leaving, few of the ways remained to leave the community (that is, if you were willing to let down the community by leaving your work to them): either go to the city and avoid authorities for 5-10 years or go to Southern Russia (Kozaks) or Urals/Siberia (thus Russian expansion to those areas with state following the peasant path).

The power of nobility over the serfs was not absolute. Say, in 1760ies landlord Saltychikha murdered a large number of her peasants and was sentenced to life term in jail and still features as an example of cruelty of the nobility in the school textbooks.

This system proved to be hard to reform, finally, reforms of 1861 (land to landowners, some of the land to the serfs with government credits) left number of peasants w/o land and Stolypin agrarian reforms aimed on transforming communities into more capitalistic enterprises with private land ownership had the same result: large number of poor and landless peasants/proletariat which were instrumental in the revolution of 1917.