The chaos was inevitable, it happens ever time and in every society, specially after 70 years of one brutal regime. I was expecting even worse ( and it was bad ).

And after a certain period of suffering and unrest, people just want "stability" and that's when any well-intention-ed politician in a country with 5min of democracy experience don't stand a change against the quintessential competent strongman savior of the once-great empire.

The problems and solutions for Russia are inside, but I don't see how that society after 70 years + 20 under alternate realities can change to actually modern and democratic ( which is very different from being Americanized ).

Most of the Warsaw pact are doing much better ( in terms of democratic and economic development ) than most of the ex-Soviet republics, even though they came through a similar path. So it wasn't inevitable.

All of them gone through a period of instability and serious economic hardship in the first years, that was my point. Then eventually they found the path and that path is not inevitable if they let themselves get caught by a “glorious savior”, then its inevitable they’ll end in yet another autocracy.

The former Warsaw Pact members got fewer decades of socialism, and they did not experience most of Stalinism; their experience was less brutal.

Being geographically closer to the West probably also made a difference; after the fall of socialism, more people could take a trip across the iron curtain and observe how things worked on the other side.

Maybe these days, people living in Russia should be invited to visit Europe and see how people live there. Like, maybe as a part of "propaganda budget", EU should offer one month of fully paid vacation here to every citizen of Russia. To see that we are actually not a hellhole full of Nazis; to see how even the life standards in Eastern Europe are these days closer to the West than to Russia; to understand that they could do even better (because they could do whatever Eastern Europe did, plus they would still have the oil).

Generally, people should travel more, see the world more. So that they can later return to their country and ask: "How is it possible that other countries have X, but here at home we say that it is impossible?" (And this applies to everyone. Like, Americans would probably also benefit from seeing that universal healthcare is possible and actually considered normal in some places.)

Yeltsin the predecessor was also corrupt. To protect himself when he left office, he helped Putin get into power when he resigned. Putin himself was involved in corruption in the city level in St Petersburg with the help of the mayor. Putin in turn granted Yeltsin protection from prosecutions and also covered his tracks of the corruption he was involved in St Petersburg.

Yeltsin was the alcoholic clown I referred to.

Maybe our FMI didn’t do such a good job at implementing capitalism in Russia. I know the World Bank criticized it a lot for its actions during the 1990 decade, namely Joseph Stieglitz.