Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
it was a tough choice. To transition to democracy it was necessary to dismantle and punish for the most egregious crimes the KGB and the likes, to actually prohibit Communist Party and to deny the people directly associated with the totalitarian regime of USSR any positions of power for at least 10 to 20 years. East Germany, Baltic and some other East Europe countries did for example various elements of such a process. Such "de-communization"/"lustration" though carried risk of instability, and instead US chose stability because of USSR/Russia nukes, and thus US actually helped KGB to survive the 1991. Splitting Russia further would have also helped to dampen the anti-democratic imperial drive in Russia, yet that was coming with the chances to increase the number of nuclear armed countries, and this is again why US didn't support the breakup of Russia into smaller pieces. I think such smaller pieces would have had higher chances for democratic transition due to most of them losing the imperial drive.
Belarus has never did the "lustration", and is a lost cause for the foreseeable future. Ukraine also didn't do "lustration" back in 199x, and that resulted in the grave danger to the country in 2014 when a lot of army and government officers didn't want to defend their country. So Ukraine had to do such "lustration" in the years since 2014, and today its results are obvious in their successful fight against the invasion.