This is obviously a tough question where the answers will differ somewhat depending on how you look at it. The sources I know are mostly sociological, ethnographic (e.g. Nazpary, and Nikolayenko) or based on economy or political science (e.g. Piketty, and Segert) so bear that in mind.

Measuring how people ‘feel’ is tricky, even more so in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes where expressing such is not always encouraged by the regime and opinion polling may be skewed or sporadic. But it is fair to assume that discontent was fairly widespread in the later years of the USSR. Thus some people may (at least initially) very well have been hopeful for the future.

However, one way to know what happened after the collapse is to look at the material conditions, such as GDP pr. capita. Piketty finds that Soviet (and later Russian) average income peaked in 1980 at roughly 65% of the level of western Europe and saw an unbroken fall until 1998/1999. This tells us that, at least for the first several years after the collapse there was significant material deprivation. In the case of Russia there is at present quite high income inequality, and massive capital flight, the latter which increased by a large margin from 1990 to 2015 (Piketty 2020).

Other indicators that can help give a broader understanding is to look at societywide pathologies. The first few years after the collapse saw marked increases in alcoholism, domestic violence, and crime. You can actually see the life-expectancy of drop in wake of the dissolution, which is not uncommon in times of instability, but the statistics are pretty grim (Segert et al. 2018). Another account that corroborates this view, is the ethnographic account of Nazpary (2002), who did fieldwork in Almaty in the 1990’ies. Although the situation in Russian cities, such as Moscow, may have been different, it tells us something about how the working class (both Russian and Kazakh) experienced instability, disposession, as well as widespread gendered violence.

It is also worth noting that after the immediate collapse of the Soviet-Union, there was a lot of ethnic nationalities spread out over the former territory of the USSR. At this point, there had not formally been ethno-national states for a very long time, and thus many ethnicities, especially Russians found themselves in new states that had a new ethnic makeup. In the case of Kazakhstan for instance, the Russians found themselves as a minority in a new state which ruthlessly favored Kazakhs for positions of political and economic leadership. In some ways, this was a reversion of a socio-political system that to some extent favored ethnic Russians before the collapse of the USSR (Nazpary 2002).

Many of the former soviet republics has seen a fair amount of social protest since the 1990’ies. In Russia regime protest has generally been less succesful than for example in Georgia or Ukraine (See Nikolayenko, who has written extensively on this in several articles from 2007 - 2015). This tells us something about the general political climate and stability of the region, but it is awfully difficult to draw direct causalities here. On a sort of off-topic note, some Russian sociologists find that support for Putin is in some ways bolstered by a fear of returning to the chaos of the Soviet dissolution (Volkov 2012, Clement 2015).

All in all, there is certain indicators and accounts that point toward that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a very traumatic event for a large part of the regular people who lived through it. While there may have been initial hope for the future, the amount of material deprivation and social instability would most likely have made a serious impact on how people felt about the future.

I hope the answer is useful, even though it is probably more on the political-sciency side than strictly historical. I have, however, tried to stick to claims that several sources back up, or that (in the case of Piketty) have very solid empirical background.