Yeltsin?
To this day, the KGB and some Russian Mafioso still run the place.
Right. It's a corrupt, leeching mafia state. But it is no longer an expansionist empire that spreads a freedom-destroying ideology, controls a large fraction of the world, and threatens to engulf more on any serious level.
Since when does the definition of "victory" require "making the enemy's government a nice one"? This is precisely what I'm talking about. People have been taught by, perhaps, Hollywood movies to culviate a ridiculously utopian notion of what it means to win/lose over a foe.
Transport a random American and a Russian from the 1950s to today and show them the two countries: what lives are like, what the respective economies are like. Show them the modern map of Russia - tell them about all the "former Soviet states". (Are there "former American states"?)
Heck, just focus on women: where do "mail-order brides" come from, in the popular imagination - America, or Russia? If you hear a story like: "desperate woman signed up for what she thought would be a housekeeping job, flew to Turkey, handed over her passport, and was kidnapped into prostitution", is that woman more likely to be from Russia or from America?
X is in the business of creating, marketing, and selling software in stores. Y is in the business of pirating software and selling it out of a street kiosk. Is X from Russia and Y from America - or vice versa?
Or focus on migration - did millions of Americans start coming to Russia in 1991, or vice versa? Do brilliant American college kids go to Russia to get their PhDs, or vice versa? Are there more children born in America to Russian-born parents, or vice versa?
How many Stalin, Lenin, Beria, Dzerzhinksky statues have been brought down vs. how many Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt statues?
Believe me, neither the 1950s American nor the 1950s Russian transported to today's time would be in any doubt whatsoever as to who won the Cold War.
No, we did not make Russia's government into a nice, beautiful, human-rights-respecting democracy. I never said we did. (Although it's worth pointing out that its government today is "more democratic" than it used to be.) I just said we won the Cold War. It's a bizarre modern western standard that, bizarrely, have decided that winning wars entails remaking the enemy's society into Sweden and anything less is not only failure but somehow defeat, or even "part of their plan".
The impossible-standard-of-victory problem has plagued us when it comes to evaluating Iraq, and it'd be ridiculous and sad to let it demoralize us needlessly in our thinking about the Cold War.
Yes, as you describe, we have made stunning gains where Russia has remained gloomy and in so many ways failing.
Whether or not history will read this as a temporary flow before the ebb, or as part of a longer term advantage for the forces of freedom and capitalism ... that depends on what is yet to happen.
And that I suspect is the only place that you and I actually disagree, that being on what the future holds. If the forces of light remain strong, then you will have been right, and we will both be glad that my pessimism was ill founded. If the forces of darkness resurge, then our victory in the Cold War will have been as short lived as our victory in World War I.
May the forces of liberty be with you.