Forgive my ignorance, but I often read comments about how Russia was gutted in the 90s after the destruction of the USSR by neoliberal policy/privatization. But if so, how did it meaningfully manage to retain sovereignty in a way that other countries who were made vassals were stripped of theirs? Is it mostly just that domestic Russian capitalists were powerful enough that they were the ones doing the lions share of the looting and that’s why western capitalists still couldn’t subsume them like they wanted?
Forgive my ignorance, but I often read comments about how Russia was gutted in the 90s after the destruction of the USSR by neoliberal policy/privatization. But if so, how did it meaningfully manage to retain sovereignty in a way that other countries who were made vassals were stripped of theirs? Is it mostly just that domestic Russian capitalists were powerful enough that they were the ones doing the lions share of the looting and that’s why western capitalists still couldn’t subsume them like they wanted?