[powertower]

You've named all people who could be removed just as easily as they where placed into power.

That is not a dictatorship. I'll provide an example -

Saddam Hussein was a dictator... He had the power/authority, ability, and the will, to kill half the country's population to control the other half. Not that he did it.

Thats a real dictatorship.

Another way to think about this -

Within the Soviet Union, Russia spans 11 time-zones. Just by size alone (and the diversity it provides), the country was too large to have any effective dictatorship over because of all the different regional alliances. And they had constant problems that would never end, to prove it.

Even today, Putin himself has admitted that one of the biggest problems in Russia is that both state organizations and regional authorities will not do what they are told.

[thriftwy]

That's simply not true. Russia is very centralized. Whatever power local overlords wield, gets stripped immediately should they anger Moscow. They're usually assigned from outside and as such alien to locals.