I'm happy to talk about the ways in which NATO expansion was a questionable choice, as I am inclined to agree, but that's not what you originally contended.

Russia had a Rust Belt orders of magnitude larger than the United States. It had a factory system optimized on quotas decades out of date. It had no real infrastructure for resolving economic disputes in legal terms. It had a factory manager class with little accountability.

You say these Americans worked for the Russian government. What departments? Do you think those departments had adequate control of their own police forces to enforce such policies? How do you suppose these forces would have been funded?

My point is that you are mistaken about the extent to which a Russian state was a viable entity during this period. Without an effective state, there is no real way for the west to exert the kind of influence you describe. The Washington Consensus was real, and its importance exaggerated by its exponents in the US.

To say Americans had substantial influence on Russian economic policy is indeed plain wrong. I would be honored to send you a copy of some books that explain this, and include abundant primary source documentation of my claims.

Please feel free to email me at my address as listed in my profile. I think you might really enjoy a copy of Armageddon Averted by Kotkin. It is a very enjoyable account of this era, and it quite deftly addresses your contention.

Perhaps decades later ex CIA operatives in their memoirs might reveal the extent to which the agency was present and involved in the events during that period. It's naive to think otherwise considering they were all over various banana republics with much less at stake..

Time will tell.

The CIA had virtually zero footprint in Russia throughout the Cold War. All in all, it is not a remarkably effective institution for collecting human intelligence or for sabotage – the United States IC is far superior with signals intel. Much of our history as a nation over the last 50 years reflects this; consider, who brought Khrushchev's secret speech to the United States? It wasn't a CIA officer or asset.

It is very naïve to think that the CIA is as potent as you do.

You seem to be assuming that there was a much better path that Russia could have followed, and that if the US had stayed out, it had leaders with the intelligence and good motivation to carry it out.

I find that quite dubious. For leaders it had Yeltsin who you have to admit was quite incompetent, and a bunch of greedy old Soviet officials who had been responsible for the collapse of the USSR. The liberals were weak and disorganized, and the public was simply lost.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I get the impression that you, like many, believe the West is not only entirely evil, but is the source of all the evil in the world. If I an reading you wrong, please make clear what you do actually believe.