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.

The locals in power have to want to do it too. As soon as enough don’t want it, it is over.

I’m skeptical of the idea that you can impose Democracy.

You can't impose democracy, but if democracy and associated ideas such as the free market spectacularly fails the people – as it did in the 90s – then that certainly doesn't help. We probably could have done a thing or two to make it fail less. Would that have made a meaningful difference? Hard to say for sure, but it would have been worth to try.

Not "ideas" failed the people, but the implementers - which turned out to be straight up robbers, dividing past empire's industrial base amongst them, like western idol Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky.

Where the politicians were less corrupt, the free market worked spectacularly well, like in Poland.

So it wasn't real capitalism?

There is no such thing as "real capitalism"; it's a broad and somewhat vague set of ideas with many possible implementations, none of which are more "real capitalism" than any other, although I'd argue that some implementations definitely better than others (and 90s Russia is a good example of that).

Capitalism is just an economic system with predominantly private ownership of the means of production. Whether a country's set of economically productive organizations are owned by shareholders via a stock exchange or by whomever was powerful enough to take control of them by corrupt means seems irrelevant, no?