If one does not deploy dialectics, one can essentially argue that Russia went from a massive empire with a monarch, to an even larger empire with a dictatorship (the liberal understanding of history).
While instead Russia can be understood as a series of internal contradictory processes, such as the pursuit of modernization (an idea) without the state, bureaucratic or educational institutions to support that pursuit, for example (the material). A potential negation of this is communism. However, it isn't that simple, and with the external pressure applied, the negation of the negation could potentially look a lot like what Russia under the USSR looked like, with it's own internal contradictions. A socialist state under the same geopolitical pressures as Imperial Russia.
Basically, the USSR may have somewhat resembled Imperial Russia, but we know that it only looks like that because of the negation of the negation. We could also use materialist or systemic explanations, however, only watching the material angle allows the changes to be obscured.