As someone with only naive, cosmetic knowledge in this area, humor me.. but could a lot of it be down to inherited attitudes? Somehow I made it through Anne Applebaum's 28 hour audiobook of Gulag and something that struck me was how the Russian population became trained to keep their heads down and not stand out for fear of being incriminated by others or randomly selected to be thrown into a gulag. And if you learn that demeanor, your kids will too, right? And so on and so forth, down the generations.
You have to dig deeper. In general, impact of soviet period is way overstated by foreigners (I'm Russian myself). The trend you're describing might be true, but some researchers draw its origins as far as Mongolian reign over Russia (roughly XIII-XV century).
If anything, Russian population always shows preference for a strong leadership (which is often appropriate to rephrase as "borderline or outright dictatorship"). Ivan the Terrible was saved from a coup by public support, several times. There's a much joked-about statement "Сталина на вас нет!" ("Shame there's no Stalin to set you straight!"), attributed to crazy old people.
In general, every time there was a violently harsh leader, some people will remember him (or her, in two cases) as incredibly effective. This goes at least a thousand years back, and probably as far as Rurik (legendary Scandinavian ruler INVITED by Russians of the time because "our land is big and rich, but there's no order in it").
We're also always scoring sky-high on "Uncertainty Avoidance" in Hofstede's cultural scale (google it, it's cool), and believe me, it shows in countless ways in day-to-day lives.
So, to summarize: yes, you might very well be right, but you have to shoot MUCH farther then Gulags and Soviets.
