I tend to learn from my life. I remember interesting things that people tell me about the world and I deliberately seek experiences that will better inform me.
I visited the USSR in the early 80's. I know what a desperate environment it was. In the most elite sections of St. Petersburg and Moscow the public food available in hotels and restaurants was abominable. The water was dirt brown in the faucets and showers. There was nothing that resembles the word retail. The black market for everything was vast. I left the USSR on a plane from Moscow to Tokyo. I kissed the ground. When I got off the plane. The ground in Tokyo was cleaner than anything I had seen in the USSR.
I have not been back since that tragic world became Russian. But I have many friends who have worked in Russia. Many friends who worked in the 90's and in the 2000's in Russia.
Three friends made it clear that Russia's most serious problem is that the willingness to work is almost nonexistent. One friend is a consultant in agriculture. After the fall of communism he found that farmers preferred playing games on their computers to raising crops.
Another friend bought a hydroelectric power equipment plant in St. Petersburg. He found that it took 2600 people to run the factory. The same factory required less than 200 in the United States. When he found he couldn't let many people go, he was forced to sell the plant at a big loss.
Still another friend who was there all during the 90's helped a new business get started and grow to fairly large size. At that point, in the late 90's, corruption and government intrusion become too onerous to stay in business.
All three of these friends expressed the difficulty of getting around Russia because there are no roads, there are no truck routes, there are only a few railroads, and everyone travels all distances by airplane. Moreover, much of the 90s was characterized by high crime, and higher corruption.
The generation of voters who brought in Putin acknowledged that he created a new government in which his personal friends ran the businesses. But safety was returning to the streets and corruption was limited to standard government channels.
I think those descriptions of the transition from the USSR to Russia are accurate.
What we have is a society that fell apart and the strongest institutions are the ones that survived. It was only the government and old Russian orthodoxy that survived because there was nothing else to begin with.