Not sure if it's only my family, but I would say that late 90s Moscow was better place to live compared to late 80s. I remember we had hard time buying/finding food before, many basic goods were hard to get...
Even by 94 it was already decent in big cities if you worked for one of the new businesses or pretty great if you managed to scrape up enough to start your own thing. But yeah if you stuck around in deadend job at old soviet factory it was not good
not sure what kind of Russian you were but I lived there a a foreigner around the same time and I don't buy this "hard time" buying food thing...If anything 90's was the decade where food became scarce, after the USSR collapsed.