Russia never had a functional democracy. The US has had one since 200+ years. It has had its problems no doubt, but democracy has flourished in the US and so has the rule of law. Honestly to an outsider that is US's real super power. Lets not forget that this is the country that collected a large corpus of income tax data upon which several economic theories (particularly Kuznets) were based on. Point is US invests in enforcing its laws. Something that's missing from Russia and also the former Soviet Union.

So I am hopeful that this stupidity will be solved as well.