In public, yes. But if we are to believe Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, the genesis of the Russia story was concocted the very evening after she went down in flames. From the last chapter:
Instead, Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. "She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way," this person said...The strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shke Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
The entire story arc was made up out of whole cloth and the MSM ran with it because they were so invested in a Hillary victory that they couldn't handle the truth.
I don’t doubt that the actual story was created at election time, but the idea was floating around well before.