"Properly" glosses over a lot of the intricacies of their politics. Like I said, Russia was disorganized at the time but you should not make the mistake of thinking they gladly released all of their buffers without a fight.

We have glaring evidence of their struggle to maintain power over their old buffer countries like Chechnya and Ukraine, so one can only imagine what they must have done to the others.

Edit: Just one example of how the transition wasn't without opposition is the January 1991 events in Lithuania when Gorbachev tried to re-establish soviet rule and this ended in 14 Lithuanian citizens dead.