"Democratic" is an overloaded word that I could have wielded with more caution.

I believe the utmost importance is to preserve human freedom and dignity (meaning to treat people as an end and not a mean). Western liberal democracies enable a ruling class to use violence to preserve their power and the exploitative system they benefit from. Their political system, as presented in the media, is largely a farce. But they do, so far, preserve more individual freedoms than leninist states do : freedom of speech, of movement, of organisation, from arbitrary police repression, etc. Many freedoms are lacking in the West though, such as the freedom from exploitation or the freedom not to participate in society (ie not to consent to be governed).

It's good the Soviet Union after Stalin tried to improve the standard of living. But that is besides the point of individual freedoms and governing only through the consent of the citizenry.

In fact I'm unsure whether you're counting Gorbachev in your list of benevolent dictators, but he was of your opinion and tried to actually acquire the consent of the governed. It didn't go very well, for various reasons. Lenin himself disregarded the result of a popular vote, the constituant assembly election in 1917.

There's also the question of the nomenklatura and the army. It cannot be denied they enjoyed privileges beyond what was necessary and therefore the Soviet state was at least in part extractive in that it took wealth from the workers to hand it to a minority who controlled the system.