I mean...at least when it comes to Russia, Genghis Khan is (indirectly, but unironically) at fault. Russia, being on the Easternmost fringe of Europe, actually
has developed into the ugly duckling among European states due to influence from nomadic steppe empires, and the Mongol Empire was the largest, most recent, and most influential among those. Its descendants ruled over parts of Russia until well into the Modern Period, and left an indelible mark on social and political structures.
They weren't the worst empire of the period to live under. Not by a long shot. Yes, they would wipe the Earth clean of your entire blighted civilization if you refused their demands or killed their messengers, but the first is just kind of what empires do, and the second was far from unique. You still don't fuck with diplomats, especially from a more powerful country, unless you want shit to get very real very quickly. It's codified as a war crime, even today, and in the 13th century the most common punishment for war crimes was to have your opponent play the reverse card in Atrocity Uno. Under the Mongols, you could still generally practice your own religion, you could go about life as your own culture saw fit, and you could even hope to attain a place in the Khanate's bureaucratic machinery without having to fully assimilate into Mongol culture (the Mongol conquerors were usually the ones who partially assimilated, actually, which is highly unusual). That last bit ended up being part of the problem, though. The Mongols were about as close as any real society can get to a pure expropriative empire, acting in a highly pragmatic way that may have left their subjects happier and freer than in most Absolutist Monarchies, but was ultimately geared solely toward extracting resources for the Khan and his inner circle. For the time, it was great that they didn't care who obtained those resources or how. Things became more troubling, though, when that extractive state apparatus was inherited by the Russ peoples.
Without going into too much detail, it's literally the same shit you see in the history of Post-Colonial states, only allowed to develop to its logical conclusion. That's actually not a unique hot take. Academic papers dealing honestly with the supposed economic and political race between the US and the USSR famously referred to the Soviet Union as, "Upper Volta [now Burkina Faso] with missiles", referring primarily to the country's poor economic state but also to its bizarre (by European standards) governmental apparatus. The pre-Mongol Russian states ranged from Despotism to a sort of Republicanism in their form of government. The Mongols wiped that slate clean. When an independent Russian state finally reemerged around a subordinate Russ power called the Dutchy of Moscow, it inherited structures intended to funnel power and income to the top, along with a culture of corruption and nepotism/favoritism that was fine in an extractive state (it actually helped to keep some money in Russian hands at that point) but grossly dysfunctional for an independent power attempting to build a similar form of government to its Western cousins. It's also probably a part of why the Russian Empire ended up expanding to roughly the scale of Mongolia and its successors, over mostly the same geographic expanse. It's still essentially a steppe empire centered around the conquest and exploitation of minorities in the republics. You even see the same tendency to trade land for time or military strategy during combat. There's plenty of land on the steppe, most of it uninhabited, so burning fields in the 14th century has just evolved into pulling stunts like the destruction of the Ukrainian dam at Nova Kakhovka in 2023.
Russian rulers have ranged in quality from so-called Enlightened Despots like Catherine the Great and Mikhail Gorbachev, to vicious tyrants like Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin (not technically Russian, but very much within their sphere of cultural influence), to whatever the fuck was going on under the later, short-lived Soviet premiers during the Age of Stagnation and under Boris Yeltsen's drunk ass in the '90s. They've nearly all been pragmatic Absolutists focused on personal gain, though, with the partial exception of Gorbachev and maybe Yeltsin. None of them, no matter how hard they've tried, have managed to do jack shit about the country's entrenched corruption.
There are other factors involved as well, including some that developed along similar lines in parts of Eastern Europe that saw limited or no direct Mongol rule. These exceptions kind of prove the rule, though, because they were also generally subject to or influenced by cultures shaped by a separate steppe people. The Turkic-speaking Ottomans also originated in Central Asia, before followed the same odd route of cultural development as the Mongols and partially assimilating to the culture of the people (in this case, Arabic) that they conquered. We actually get the most commonly used name for the style of government practiced by the Khanates from the Ottoman Empire. It's a Sultanate, a government where state power and the personal property of the head of state/government have no meaningful distinction. Decades or centuries of rule under a Sultanate may not be the sole contributor to modern Russian Authoritarianism, but I would say that it was a necessary factor even if it wouldn't have been sufficient on its own. Everything Russia touches seems to turn to shit because of it, as well. Korean culture has an odd relationship with government, grounded in Confucian philosophies of Filial Piety. Present-day North Korea, however, is the only uncontroversial extant Sultanate. This may look superficially similar to historical East Asian states, but the comparison quickly breaks down once you start looking at the details. Even the connection to orthodox Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is mostly aesthetic, with Juche's odd concept of the Proletariat Vanguard being collapsed into a single person rather than a party having very little basis in traditional Korean political philosophy despite claims to the contrary. It's all just horseback warrior tomfuckery, but brought up to date with fighter jets, main battle tanks, SAWs, and thermonuclear physics packages tucked into multiple reentry vehicle warheads ready to be launched on a parabolic trajectory through space. Temjin would have loved that last one, if only he could have lived 700 years to see it
TL;DR,
Mongolia fucked Russia's shit up, to the point that we now we have two failed states waving nukes around and making unrealistic demands. These demands, which would have gotten their militaries ass-raped by the big black dick of industrial capacity had they pulled the same shit prior to August of 1949, now have to be taken seriously because they can just bring the roof down with them once they start losing. History is neat.
