You cannot even begin to imagine. If you have time, then read this book.
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They genuinely wanted to try out the Western way after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the West intentionally crippled their economy via (((Shock Therapy))) to ensure they could never be a threat for decades.
West also promised no NATO troops east of East Germany after the German unification and that quickly went out the window as well.
The more you understand about how bad it was, the more you will understand how easy it was for someone like Putin to come to power and why Russia today doesn't seem interested in replacing him with someone else.
Bank managers had to order thugs to break people's legs for unpaid debts, people would drive their motorcycles after drinking 2 bottles of vodka, murders were common, parents used to go without much food so that they could feed their children at one point.
Post USSR Russia was ready to welcome America and the west, but all that did was open the country to being exploited and robbed.
Imagine that you're an average Soviet worker in the 80s. Maybe there are already some shortages, but you have a stable job, the full gamut of social protections and a sense of stability. You have a home, a dacha, two kids growing up. The TV shows wholesome stuff about harvests and the latest scientific achievements. If only you knew how bad things were going to get.
Then suddenly overnight the USSR "collapses". You are told to invest your suddenly worthless ruble savings into privatization vouchers. You have no idea how doing business in capitalism works, so you end up investing into a pyramid scheme and losing everything. Your factory gets closed up and its equipment sold to the West because it was "unprofitable" - nothing is anymore except oil, everything that isn't bolted down is getting lifted and sold to the West for a pittance.
You end up collecting bottles for a living. Your underage daughter starts skipping school to prostitute herself to support her family, but ends up spending everything on drugs. Your son gets shot in a gang war. The TV is crime reports 24/7 because that's what gets people glued to screens. Sometimes it's charlatans offering to charge your water with positive energy. Sometimes it's your leadership openly licking American boots, talking about how the USSR was evil and totalitarian, and saying how good it is that we're "good friends with the US now".
You end up having to rely on subsistence farming on your dacha in order to simply not to starve to death. Your apartment in the city gets taken by the mafia and eventually you just freeze to death on your dacha. That, without exaggeration, was the fate of millions of Russians who didn't "fit into the market". That is a quote by the leading ideologue of privatization, Anatoli Chubays, by the way. "So what if 30 millions or whatever die out? They didn't fit into the market."
It was Hell on Earth. It's one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes and episodes of human suffering in history. We can't even comprehend the enormity of horror back then. Nothing but Chechnya and crime on the TV. Fathers became smugglers. Mothers came home bruised, robbed, possibly raped frequently.
Grandmothers having nervous breakdowns because they are the only family member with a stable job with the state and single-handedly provided for half a dozen people. Everything is filthy, the ground is littered with used heroin syringes, streets are filled with people peddling random goods in makeshift "markets" just to survive. And that was in the latter half of the 90s when everything was slowly getting better due to growing oil prices. The earlier years were 10x as apocalyptic.
I remember reading once that the demographic and economic devastation caused by the fall of the USSR and privatization rivals that of WW2. Sounds about right to me to be honest. The only thing more destructive than this in my opinion in Russian History is the Soviet Revolution of 1917.
