Congratulations? Everything since then has been worse.
Agreed. There were even glimmers of democracy in the waning days of Imperial Russia. Russia would most likely look like one of the generic parliamentary monarchies of Europe today if the Revolution had never happened. We might have even been spared WWII (or at least the European theater) and the Nazis since fear of communism would not have been high enough to propel fascists to power without the existence of an actual communist state.
It wasn't what propelled Mussolini to power, but local socialists who would have been active no matter what in postwar Italy. For better or worse, it took a second world war to curb the attraction (at least in Europe) of violent leftist and rightist groups that enabled them to successfully take power from a democratic regime.
