... often just because rulers were so scared by the French experience, that they caved at the first demand for better forms of government.

In a similar way, a lot of worker rights gained in the XX century were introduced only because elites were utterly scared by the Soviet experience.

Sometimes it helps to have a reference, so to speak.

Speaking of which, before the revolution in which Soviets came to power, we had serfdom in russia - basically our version of a feudal system

Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861.

Eh... _kind of_. It was abolished in such a way that in practice it kept more or less functioning for a very long time afterwards.

If you mean that peasants still had to rely on the land owned by somebody else to survive, then yes. But this had been the case in every country that had serfdom and abolished it, usually until industrialization funneled all those peasants into the cities.

But serfdom is a lot more than that - it's literally treating people as slaves, selling them etc. That part was decisively abolished.

By 1917, when the Revolution happened, peasants' primary concern was access to and control of the land, not personal freedom.

As I understand it, many emancipated serfs and their descendants were still paying off a substantial tax intended to compensate landowners into the 20th century, often by working for the same landowners. It was clearly an improvement over serfdom, but likely a worse situation than contemporary peasants elsewhere.