I'll field this one if I may. I haven't had the luxory of time to dedicate to fact-based posts, so I've been quipping lazily for a few months now. . .But I have oodles of time tonight, so I'm going to take that out on you
First, we need to clear the air a bit, set our dogmatically induced knee-jerk reactions to the Communist question aside for a moment, and admit to a few less than savoury suspicions. For instance, the simplistic assumption that Capitalism, the CIA or the Cold War was the ultimate death of the Soviet Republic is frivolous, fanciful and clearly false. The seeds of disatisfaction, and the eventually dissolution, were sown by the system itself -The governmental system, not the economic methodology. The most asute observations I have read regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union were those of Szelényi, Eyal and Townsley in their combined work "Russia: Capitalism without Captialists", who attributed the civic discontent with Communism to the feudalistic influences (the unquestionable loyalty to political patrons and requisite faith in the socialist world-view being very much reminisent of the logic behind the feudal ranking system).
Now, looking at it thusly, one cannot help but see that the problem is not Capitalism itself, its Capitalism as instituted by non-Capitalists. By men whom were formally managers of Communist-based corporate strategies finding themselves in radically different economic settings than those they had spent a lifetime learning to manipulate, so it is a question not of economic captial but cultural capital - A reference I don't expect you to understand OAO, unless you are familiar with the sociological perspective.
Historically, it is quite clear that the sudden introduction of open industry coupled with monetarism led to the general impovervishment of the British blue-collar working class during the Industrial Revolution, inspiring an unprecedented scale of failures amongst the proprietors of lower-level private market venues. Likewise in Russia we see similar trends now where, according to the above mentioned authors : "The poor have become poorer, {and} the most striking development of post-communism is that the not-so-poor have become poor, too." It is right and natural, for Capitalism is not a magical cure inducing economic salvation, its presence will not rectify years of stagnant beauocratic entanglement no more than prayers offered up to Milton Friedman will bless business ventures.
Boris Kagarlitsky, a former Communist dissident and leader of the non-Communist socialist opposition to Boris Yeltsin once said: "It's ridiculous to think that Russia could build a US-style system in a few years, or ever. What we have got is a version of peripheral capitalism, in which all the driving forces are from outside. Instead of gradually accumulating capital and building up national industry as, say, the US did, Russia has been disaccumulating capital.
"It's incredible that Western leaders now affect shock over the corruption and dysfunctional economics that took root in Russia. After all, just a little while ago, the Russian elite who did this were hailed as heroes of reform and warriors of democracy in the West.
"Where did all the money go? Don't look for it in Russia."
Well, I'm sure the above hasn't satisfied all the concerns over the Communist question, so provided below is a link which explains more fully some of the things which I have only touched on (which, may I add, I was surprised and delighted to find already on the net as I did not have them readily available to reference or type
):
Russia's Broken 'Wheel Of Ideologies'
http://archive.tol.cz/transitions/wheel1.html