Mikhail Gorbachev has died

The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet Union to glasnost and perestroika.

Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.

I think the big difference is the oligarchs. The USSR had already been transitioned to a resource state, and there was no actual rebuilding that needed to happen. The Marshall plan was almost easy because you could tally up all the broken bridges and say “itll cost us $X to fix”. What’s the equivalent for post USSR? What ended up happening was oligarchs swooped in to take over from the central planners, and it’s not clear how the US could have helped steer it differently short of going to war with Russia’s upper class.

The U.S. held a lot of sway in the post USSR. They lent a lot of credibility to Yeltsin.

If the U.S. had pushed for a system that actually would've held the resources in trust for the people and allowed them to be developed by market capital, that very likely could've happened.

But the reality is that across every region of the globe, the U.S. in the constant purity quest of its foreign policy had purposefully alienated anyone with anything other than right of center views. It found itself cozied up to the most audacious, self dealing, would be autocrats, cartelists and outright gangsters for the very reason that they stood the most to gain from the decline of Communism and so they beat their chest the hardest against it.

Particularly the Reagan and Bush administrations had little interest in looking over the shoulders of those they had been ready to support as promelgators of coup. Though instead the Communists committed political suicide and these entrepreneurs of corruption instead would pick over the carcass of the state.

>If the U.S. had pushed for a system that actually would've held the resources in trust for the people and allowed them to be developed by market capital, that very likely could've happened.

No, this is purely wishful thinking. The Soviet System was one fundamentally incentivized and propagated corruption. Those who had previously been in control or had knowledge of the workings of the Soviet Economy were always going to profit significantly. The US had little control over this.