I thought Russia's economy was on the verge of collapse, experiencing double-digit inflation, running on the last legs of a war economy, and absolutely mismanaged by a single man with irrational motives.
What happened?
It's as if we're being constantly lied to or something.
Oligarchs trying to save their asses. Remember, whoever gets the majority can dictate the market, and sadly regular people (those who struggle the most) are not the majority stakeholder in the economy.
You're describing all of capitalism everywhere across all time. Are you trying to explain something specific about the current situation?
I think you missed the authoritarian part of the regime in Russia
The authoritarian part? Are you familiar with what's going on in LA right now? Or that the NYPD is the world's 7th largest standing army with a military budget larger than North Korea or Ukraine? Or that the US has led the world in rate of imprisonment for decades? Or that the US military budget is larger than the next 9 countries combined? Or that the US spends enough police and prisons to make "US police state" the world's third largest military budget?
How about that the origin of common stock was the Dutch East Indies company, which then proceeded to colonize vast swathes of the planet, commiting mass murder and rape, and leading the transatlantic slave trade?
Or how about the French in Algeria? The Germans of your grandparents' time? The English? And obviously all of the former colonies that are now white settler states like Canada and Australia (having already spoken of the US), and how they mass murdered, oppressed, imprisoned, brainwashed, raped, and tortured indigenous people and still occupy their land, refuse them justice, destroy their ecosystems, and use force to opppse any resistance?
Capitalism is authoritarian, everywhere and always. It has to be because it's built on the government enforcement of artificial constructs like private property, intellectual property, and oppressed wage labor.
Russia is not meaningfully different on the "authoritarian" facet.