In the 80's I hoped for a "reform communist" renovation of the USSR, along the lines of (Italian ;-) Eurocommunism. A Trotskyist inspired, "political revolution, " (ala Poland with Solidarity) seemed to me, to be highly unlikely. But, once Gorby started to take the lid off after the yrs. of Brezhevite stagnation, the accumulation of (overdetermined) structural economic, social and political crises, imploded the Soviet system, given a push by the Reaganite arms race and the debacle in Afghanistan.
Russia will never be "Western style liberal democracy, " whatever Michael McFaul, etc. wishes for but, Chris'es continual shilling for Putin is annoying.
As for the gangsterization/privatization, under Yeltsin, any reader of Telos in the 70's, with its pieces by Victor Zaslavsky, among others, or Dissent, New Left Review, TNR, Soviet Studies, Problems of Communism, International Socialism of the Cliffite Trots, International Viewpoint of the Mandelite Trots, familiar with an analysis of the Soviet social formation as a New Class society, where the highest ranks of the CPSU nomenklatura and factory managers, in a society where the MOP where owned by a state-party appeartus, that had by the late 20's eviserated forms of bottom up, proletarian democracy, negated any illusions in , "really existing socialism, "wasn't surprised.
As for the USSR being a counter-weight to the US Empire see the debates in, "Exterminism and Cold War, " Verso. I tend to see both blocs like Thompson, as exercising blackmail over their respective spheres, to the mutual benefit of the ruling classes in each bloc.
Gorbachev roomate in college, Zdenek Mlynar, who was on the Czechoslovak CP CC during the Prague Spring of '68, wrote in his memoir, "Nightfrost In Prague, " that Brezhnev called LBJ, to see if there would be any response with teeth to a Warsaw Pact invasion. The answer was essentially, we respect your right to fuck with the subjects of your dungeon as well as you respect respect our right to rain napalm down on Vietnam or arm Guatemalan death squads.