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.

Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but if I'm not, I'm skeptical. Marshall plan notwithstanding, I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. Likewise, the people of Russia and their government are ultimately the ones with agency in their case. I don't think the U.S. should take on the burden of developing other countries; going down that road has been a bad idea more often than not.

> I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening.

I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by supporting Japan's very successful land redistribution scheme.

Thanks for the suggestion about learning about the occupation. To be clear: my statement wasn't that the U.S. did nothing, but that there is no amount they could have done which would force Japan to succeed against their will, or their own ability. There are many examples of the U.S. putting its thumb on the scale, so to speak, in countries where there was not a subsequent, successful democratic transition. The difference between these cases, I'm suggesting, is not the weight of U.S. involvement, but factors external to U.S. foreign policy, such as the people in the countries affected.

I see what you mean.

I guess we'll never know. Because there was a remaking of Japanese society after the war in a democratic image. That just doesn't even appear as though it was attempted in post Soviet Russia.

I don't kmow the origins of why America departed from its usual course of propping up the traditional land owning and wealthy bourgeoisie classes in it' s occupation of Japan. I know FDR personally held very pro democracy and anti colonialist views. He had ambitions to remake America's relations with the developing world after the war though how far he would've progressed on that front is unknown. And of course he was dead by the end of the war and Japan was in the more conservative hands of Truman.

Perhaps the Japanese people ran with this program because of their cultural tenacity. Or perhaps because their defeat had been so total that they truly considered themselves defeated and simply wished to move on whatever with whatever power structure was presented.

Ultimately though, America began a campaign to turn the "subjects" of the Japanese Empire into "citizens" of a Japanese constitutional state. They did not undertake a similar project to turn "comrades" of the Soviet Union into "citizens" of a Russian Republic.

The US never invaded Russia, so they didn’t have the kind of power they had over post WW2 Japan.

Anyways even with that kind of power, the prevailing economic ideology at the time the Soviet Union fell was of extreme neoliberalism, so I doubt it would have helped anyway.