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In the '90s Gaidar and others were vociferously trying to say that the USSR succumbed from within, even as many in the West tried to undermine any claims that Reagan had much to do with its demise.
Some economists pointed to things like Khrushchev's corn/maize fixation and other such leader-based insanities. One analysis pointed out that the economic production from nearly no-wage zeki in the GULags supported the USSR, and the economy's output flattened as the GULags shrank. Others noted that big industrial projects under Stalin and Khrushchev had trouble being adapted to the kind of innovation and flexibility that were required in newer economies.
Others pointed to a loss of inspiration and drive, as the true believers from the Soviet "greatest generation" of the "war communists" of the '20s and '30s and the anti-fascist heroes of the '40s fairly bloodless, nihilist hacks in the '60s and '70s. By the '80s few believed in the state or were willing to put up with the distortions it led to, in truth or wealth.
This was, in part, a matter of national pride. Nobody wanted to think that the West had won. Then things went really fubar and by 2000 nobody wanted to believe that the Russians had shit that extensively in their own well. Xenophobia reigned, and the idea that the USSR was brought low by the CIA in collaboration with CIA agents ruled. Even as Russia's economy was improving, unemployment was beginning to drift down, and the corruption indices were plummeting, Putin was elected. He dismissed leading indicators and claimed credit for what happened a month after he was elected, even though it was pretty much a done deal before the election.
Since then everything bad is the West's fault. Every lack of recognizing that they are at least equal with the richest, most advanced, most power, etc., is an intentional slight--factual or not. It plays to nationalism and a sense of destiny that was promulgated as part of the 3rd Rome belief before 1918, reinterpreted as faith in the catechism and manifest destiny of the 3rd International after 1919, and then reinvented as the true opponents of fascism and the country that saved the world from Hitler and Tojo after 1945--single-handedly. (With the West having sacrificed the purely Russian Red Army by conspiring with Hitler to destroy the USSR, only getting in on the war when the Red Army had already shown that its victory was inevitable--with everything done possible to undermine the USSR. The Red Army's entry into the Pacific front was the real reason for Japan's surrender. Otherwise the West was going to lose.)
It really hurt at the Russian national narrative when so many of the Eastern European countries' populations rejected Russia and Russian. Russians in Brno were furious when, one summer, the overlarge memorial declaring the eternal gratitude of the Moravians to the liberating Soviet Russian soldiers was ground flat, the Soviet symbols gone and the words of eternal gratitude un-etched from the granite. Those who remembered the Soviet tanks rolling into the Zeli trh in 1968, of course, to suppress their protests were pleased, and that made the Russians even more furious. Ukraine, which had soldiers fighting the Red Army even in the '40s (and into the early '50s), was a special problem: The censorship of anything that expressed a desire Ukrainian independence in the 1800s continued right until 1993. It's more ingratitude, meaning more psychological humiliation: The Ukrainians, like the Czechs and Poles and Lithuanians and Latvians, etc., ought to be grateful. At least the Russians believe that. Deeply. They were taught they suffered for these ingrates.
When Condaleeza Rice said that Russia had too many natural resources for one country it was taken as leaking a plan to dismember Russia. (Rather like saying "The Kennedys have too much wealth for one family" can only mean that we're planning to rob them. Their translators did a sucky job, but in all honesty nobody wanted to believe them that this was a way of saying "they've really got resources."
That, sadly, played into the xenophobes' and paranoids' world-view: As the USSR fell, places like Yakutia declared autonomy and things like taxation authority, control of local resources, etc. (much like the Donbassites are trying to claim now). Moscow rolled back a lot of these claims, but it was a long, slow process and Moscow ceded significant authority in establishing territorial integrity, and only in the last five years really returned tight control to the central authority in all but name.
Russians have rights. Everybody else has obligations. Eastern Europe is both Russia's sphere of influence (Stalin and Hitler agreed) but also the Russian's burdern, the responsibility of the older brother for younger, less responsible, siblings that need wise guidance and need to have a keeper. That's the heart and soul of imperialism; we act like it's dead and gone, but it's still around, in spades. And Putin's not so much terrified of having Russian imperialism thwarted as he is terrified of having Russian imperialism rolled back--whether it's the idea of actual federalism in Chechnya, the minute calls for federalism in Siberia, or the idea that non-contiguous recently annexed territory like Kaliningrad might be reclaimed by its fairly recent owners (like Putin reclaimed the Crimea).
