The soviets did an impromptu visit to a Texas supermarket and after seeing the immense and opulent prosperity of America they wrongly concluded that it was capitalism itself and not the United States abundant resources, sitting out ww2, unique geography and lack of hostile neighbors that made such prosperity possible.

So in true Slavic fashion they saw something complex but applied a surface level understanding to it and reasoned that if they just switched over they would magically become prosperous too.

And then shock therapy happened at the urging of American economists, and them the chaos of the 90s happened. And then things got so shitty and bad that ex-KGB puppet master Putin basically had to step in and strongman the oligarchs back under control with the threat of death and implement a bunch of quasi-socialist policies to stabilize things.

But even despite all that capitalist russia is still a shadow of its former glory. A shuffling zombie lunching forward on old Soviet reserves and crumbling infrastructure.

Worse still they have to watch as China which didn't give up on communism and indeed improved upon it, overshadow them in every aspect simply by not trying to copy americans.