Very good point about Russia - and I would expand it to most of the former Soviet block and Eastern Europe.
Democracy only works if voters are competent and the vote counting process is fair. Without rule of law, you get coerced/bribed voters filling ballot boxes and criminals tallying the results.
Not just around voting - it's the whole infrastructure of public accountability. There needs to be some way to prevent the elected from simply giving themselves the state oil company, etc.
Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company?
Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news?
> Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.
There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately.
(WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)