Except that isn't what happened at all. Gorbachev led to Yeltsin and only after the interventionist cartel bombed Serbia did an old KGB hand appear on the scene.
Even then, it wasn't until the piffling global interventionists decided to carve themselves an even big slice of eastern Europe that Russia began to push back.
Nope.
The collapse had been coming for years, began in earnest with Gorbachev and accelerated with Yeltsin, and Russia for quite a while was on the brink of anarchy. That had nothing to do with "interventionist cartels" (which is a fancy way of saying "neocon," which is also stupid), and everything to do with the total and inevitable collapse of the communist government and economy.
The subsequent reassertion of power by the "Russian Oligarchs" and the likes of Putin, was predictable because it's how Russia has always been. The question of how to deal with their attempts to re-establish "Old Russia" is not an easy one, especially as it deals with a kind of power projection that was supposedly rendered obsolete a century ago.
The confluence of Putin's brand of hard-nosed power politics, and Obama's brand of talk-heavy and sophomoric narcissism, naturally favors Putin. Interestingly, Hillary Clinton's brand of corrupt and self-serving criminality is probably closest to Putin's approach, although he'll steam-roll her just as effectively as he has Obama and Kerry. Trump would get mad, and just try to tweet him to death....
