Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
I think that's overstating the case. In fact the "average Russian person" was living in destitute poverty through most of the cold war, and none of that meaningfully changed with the advent of a market economy. Except that Russians of the 2000's could get eat better food and watch (much) better TV.
It's absolutely true that most of the western aid ended up hurting and not helping. But the bar was very, very low to begin with.
Genuinely asking, did you live East of the Wall back then?
Because I did live East of the Wall (not in the former USSR, though), and I can assure you that we were most certainly not living in "destitute poverty" (my dad was a civil engineer, my mum had graduated from a hydro construction faculty). My parents did end up living in destitute poverty, as in having to get back to literally subsistence agriculture in order to survive, but that only came in the second part of the '90s, once democracy had already been in place for a few good years (and democracy had come with privatizations and price liberalizations).