Rank the Russian Governments in the past 300 years

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All of them have been different degrees of shambolically and oppressive, and bad in different ways that make direct comparison pretty hard. And each "government" has a lot of variation in badness depending on the leaders - a lot of people bin this thread are splitting the USSR into the Lenin/Stalin/Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Gorby years, but to me treating the "Russian Empire" as a period that could be rated as a whole is equally flawed.

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There's a decent argument to be made than New Economic Policy was - if not great, the best economic policies Russia tried out, especially coming after the insanity of War Communism.

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I mean, the Soviet Union did objectively jab and poke at America's political machinery from the scenery. Mccarthyism was a completely overblown set of conspiracies (indeed, the unions and democrats had largely already purged their Communists already) but there was a grain of truth.

It also seems absurdly parochial to complain that Putin has pushed a distasteful leader in America, when the likes of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev pushed exceedingly nasty regimes on Hungary, Poland, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Ethiopia etc. (And hypocritical given the US also interfered with domestic politics in Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy etc)

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what scale is "objective evil" measured in, anyway?

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Tbh Russia under NEP wasn't terrible (relatively anyway), but the Lenin rule also includes the insanity of War Communism.