Little to do with culture, everything to do with infrastructure, geography and for the 20th century and onwards messy politics. Russias geography is... rather paradoxical.
It's a country with pretty much some of the biggest landmass on earth, but very few of that landmass has been exploitable for resources. For most of history this has largely been due to its climate being rather hostile to humans - Russias more navigable areas are up north, which isn't great if you want to use it for things like farmland and other basic needs. The southern part of the country is on the other hand rather mountainous, which is also hard to grow resources on.
All of that has resulted in a country where most people congregate in big cities and an infrastructure that outside of those cities is just... barely existent.
The result is that anyone wanting to lead Russia will invariably end up gravitating towards concentrated leadership; the individual cities where most Russian citizens live don't have the resources around them to entirely sustain themselves independently, so all of them need to stay together. Combine that with a poor infrastructure and anyone looking for a power grab in the capital has an easy opportunity to do so if a vacuum ever arises[0].
[0]: The tsar was basically a monarch, which historically has been in general how countries operate. Lenin was specifically send to Russia by the Germans to attempt and disrupt the Russian front during WW1 (and Stalin can be summarized as "Lenin but worse"). The between leaders after Stalin were trying to uphold the same beliefs as him. Putin's powergrab is the result of him taking advantage of the fact that Yeltsin screwed up the de-sovietization process and just dumped Russia into anarcho-capitalism overnight (there was basically no transition process between the Soviet model and neoliberalism, which resulted in anarcho-capitalism).
It's a country with pretty much some of the biggest landmass on earth, but very few of that landmass has been exploitable for resources. For most of history this has largely been due to its climate being rather hostile to humans - Russias more navigable areas are up north, which isn't great if you want to use it for things like farmland and other basic needs. The southern part of the country is on the other hand rather mountainous, which is also hard to grow resources on.
All of that has resulted in a country where most people congregate in big cities and an infrastructure that outside of those cities is just... barely existent.
The result is that anyone wanting to lead Russia will invariably end up gravitating towards concentrated leadership; the individual cities where most Russian citizens live don't have the resources around them to entirely sustain themselves independently, so all of them need to stay together. Combine that with a poor infrastructure and anyone looking for a power grab in the capital has an easy opportunity to do so if a vacuum ever arises[0].
[0]: The tsar was basically a monarch, which historically has been in general how countries operate. Lenin was specifically send to Russia by the Germans to attempt and disrupt the Russian front during WW1 (and Stalin can be summarized as "Lenin but worse"). The between leaders after Stalin were trying to uphold the same beliefs as him. Putin's powergrab is the result of him taking advantage of the fact that Yeltsin screwed up the de-sovietization process and just dumped Russia into anarcho-capitalism overnight (there was basically no transition process between the Soviet model and neoliberalism, which resulted in anarcho-capitalism).