I have recently asked a question on the Russian subreddit /r/russia about what it would take for Russia to be a willing member of the international community and not require the creation of client-states around their territory as a buffer zone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/russia/comments/4o5lxr/the_perception_from_the_west_is_that_russia_is_a/
The general response was that the West has always attacked Russia and that the West is responsible for the 1990s collapse of the Russian economy and that the enlargement of NATO has created a threat to Russia that undermines Russian sovereignty and is against agreements made to Russia that NATO would not incorporate any former Soviet state.
I am not sure what to make of this. What historical evidence is there to support this point?
A lot of economic issues Russia dealt with following the collapse of the Soviet Union are the direct result of a lot of stuff that went down in the 1980s.
By the time Gorbachev took power, the Soviet economy was already declining. The war in Afghanistan, in particular, was costing the Soviet government dearly. By 1989, inflation had taken hold, and, though people generally had a fair amount of Rubles, you couldn't buy anything because there was nothing to buy; you had to stand in Great Depression-esque lines for bread. That contributed a lot to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When the USSR DID collapse, Russia lost a lot of its manufacturing areas. A lot of food and coal came from the Ukraine and Belarus. Plus, there was no real government at this time; the Politburo had been disbanded, and although there was something of a government in place, it served mostly to continue the status quo and not address problems.
Since the rouble was worth so little in post-Soviet Russia, people who could get their hands on hard foreign currency were generally able to get ahead of the competition. Since a lot of that was controlled by the Mafia, that also helped.
Overall, public services had all but collapsed, everything was run by the mob, and the rouble wasn't worth a whole lot.