When talking about democracy, the two decisive factors to me are:

- lack of absolute power within limited groups of people; the more people taking part in making important decisions, the better; it's not by a long shot democracy when there's a "tsar"/"emperor"/"president" (whatever you call it) who's making all the decisions and to whose will everyone's serving; it's not democracy either when there's a parliament whose representatives mostly belong to one party, and all they do is sign off whatever their bosses decide; so here - a real multi-partial system and a lot of people involved in long discussions before any important law comes out, and not a one limited group being able to get any decision passed that only they would benefit from; no need to mention, not a single man having any hypothetical power at all;

- the interests of an individual being superior to the interests of "society"; overall, when someone talks about "the interests of society", I think they're being hypocritical, because there's no society other than that consisting of individuals; if you want to make society happy - make every individual happy, that's it; in my view, any application of collectivism is incompatible with democracy, because it says everyone has to be unhappy so that the "group"/"society" etc. on the whole will be happy; but that's nothing but an oxymoron.

So, looking at Russia, I think it certainly has made big progress building up democracy compared to what it looked like 30-40 years ago, but I have to say there are still tons of work in that direction. One negative side in my opinion is, it seems the quest for democracy slowed down a bit at the beginning of the 2000s. But I guess everything's in the hands of Russians, we have yet to see them notice what way they had taken, and turn up to the right one.