Why can't Russia be normal?

Russia has always been a mystery.
February 5, 2007
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_kinsman/20070205.html

After a scary night of lethal fighting in October 1993, when renegade parliamentarians tried to usurp then president Boris Yeltsin, I can remember an anguished TV panellist asking, "Why can't Russians be normal?"

Nothing about those days in Russia fitted anybody's definition of "normal." A totalitarian society and state-controlled economy had flip-flopped in the space of months. Behaviour recently forbidden became mandatory for success, whose very definition turned socialist principles upside down. Moviemaking stopped because fiction could not match everyday drama.

Ragging the puck
Under the shock therapy that accompanied the shift to open markets, too many ordinary Russians were adversely affected while gangsters prospered and sly operators manipulated a new capitalist system for which no legal framework yet existed.

Boris Yeltsin was an earthy populist whose intuition sought three fundamental rights for Russians: To own property, to speak freely, and to elect their government.
But Yeltsin soon lost his hero status. GDP fell by 50 per cent under his watch. Crime doubled.
People wanted a leader who would stop the rot, make them proud again, after the breakup of the USSR, and the depressing inversion of so many lives. In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned in favour of a prime minister rapidly promoted from obscurity, Vladimir Putin.
Shortly afterward, Putin won the presidential election with 52 per cent of the vote.
Putin was elected to stabilize Russia. When President George W. Bush said he looked into Putin's eyes and "saw his soul," Russians laughed because that was the last thing they saw or wanted.