Putins regime was a massive economic improvement from Yeltsins regime though, which is one reason why he is (was? hard to gauge) so popular.
Also counter examples of more authoritarian regimes having economic resurgences - south korea, taiwan, to lesser extents china and vietnam... I'm sure there's more.
no. it's not. It just happened during the rise in the global oil prices
Right, I guess there's a lot of debate on why things improved so much economically around that time. But still people will tend to associate it with the administration it happened under - we do it in western countries as well.
examples: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, ...