Susan Woodward of the Brookings Institution argued that the failure to impose order upon a collapsing Communist order provided the opportunity for ancient hatreds, never far under the beautiful landscape, to break out again.

When people live under totalitarian “order” the last thing they want is more order, even of a liberal democratic stripe (and I mean both those terms in the small L small D sense). So you had your lost decade of the 1990s in Russia under Yeltsen. Then, having lived under absolute anarchy, people want order again. So now you got Putin.