And that would just be a step too far.
Eh. Through the history of the 90s, it looked like they might have a shot at establishing a free and stable democracy.
Then privatization and mishandled foreign aid created their oligarchs, quality of life fell through the floor in basically all the post-Soviet states, people got mad, tired, and scared, Putin stepped in to "stabilize the situation"— Then the politicians and journalists started dying, crazy siloviks and vatniks fully captured what was left of their political institutions I guess, and now they're doing a lot of evil murder and various interesting atrocities.
There might have been/probably were underlying cultural factors that made it impossible for Russia to ever stabilize as a "normal" country at that point. But those are hard to see from an outside perspective, and I guess they're probably pretty hard to see from inside as well.