I did not forget entierly about the civil society because the cycle goes like this:
In the beginning of the cycle you have a very strong man — some kind of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin. Somebody who uses force to wrastle resources from the elites and kill and chops the elites in parts.
Then, once the resources are gathered, they are thrown into building a new army.
Then, the new army goes and conquests, and Russia becomes Big and Great. Siberia is already conquered. Peter the Great conquers the Baltic. Katherine will conquer Ukraine. And something like that…
Next, what do they do next? Whatever one does after success… You rest. You rest on laurels. Next, is that we are the champions, we are the champions of the world.
Great, and next comes a very good decay. This is kind of Brezhnev's time stagnation, only in the XVIIth century. Good, the time to relax.
And when you start relaxing, immediately demon inteligencia emerges. This is when your civil society strikes back. And the first Russian dissidents are (as you, probably, know):
Andrey Kurbsky, prince, who ran to Lithuania and was writing the famous correspondence between Kurbsky and Ivan the Terrible, We must be loyal to the Old Religion, and so forthand who is saying: “You became not liberal, and not western enough. You must be more western, more like Lithuania. Because Lithuania is advanced, it is democratic. It is in Europe.”
On the other hand there is Protopop Avvakum, the founder of the Old Believers of the Russian Church, saying: “This is an abomination. You are forgetting the laws of our ancestors. We must go back, not ahead in time. We must be loyal to the Old Religion, and so forthWe must be loyal to the Old Religion, and so forth”