Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
Of course Yeltsin was a big part of the problem too.
Near the end of the book, George HW Bush tries to convince the US government to provide economic aid to stabilize the fledgeling Russian state but this fails. Earlier in the book there is talk of a "Grand Bargain", a theory that for $100 billion the US could convert the USSR from an enemy into a friend similar to how the Marshall Plan and Berlin Airlift converted the Germans into close US allies. Japan is another example of this. After WW2, instead of razing Japan and Germany as Rome did to Carthage, the US raised them from their knees. It helped rebuild and rehabilitate these countries.
There was no Marshall Plan for Russia. Many of the Russian politicians and economists expected significant economic aid from the West. This aid did not materialize, at least not in the form and magnitude that was expected. The transition from state socialism to capitalist market economy was traumatic; during the USSR the poverty rate was 30%, after the collapse the poverty rate was 80%. The average lifespan of a Russian man was 66 during the USSR, after the collapse it was around 55.
The loss of super power status, of territory, and of economic strength created significant political backlash in the years following the collapse. These conditions promoted nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism which Putin used to seize control. Russia does not have a cultural history of democracy so maybe this was inevitable, but perhaps greater Western support would have avoided it?
For example it needs the firm rule of law to be established, yet it is not clear there's anything the US could have done to prevent the divvying up of state resources amongst clever individuals who appropriated vast wealth, through usually dishonest means, becoming today's oligarchs. Nor could the US do anything to eliminate the Russian pride that remained in their former empire, which placed fairly unique pressures on Russia's leaders ("we may be poor but at least everyone else is afraid of us" was not as much of a fringe attitude among the common people as one might think).
So I don't think the conditions were at all similar between Germany and Japan on the one hand, and the Russian Federation on the other, and I don't think any kind of Marshal plan could have ever worked without these missing conditions.
After all, for decades we thought of China that if we just made them all rich, they'd all see the benefits of Western democracy and become more like us ideologically. So the West encouraged open trade with China and... the end result was a country which now had the resources to reäffirm their state ideology. Today we see a China pushing to strengthen the Maoist values it was founded on, rather than dismantling them.
Unfortunately, without utter national humiliation that completely breaks the people's belief in their former state ideology, I just don't think ideological transformation in any kind of short period of time is possible.