I think it’s fair to say Russia exacerbated our existing issues. That doesn’t absolve us, as you point out, but it’s not unreasonable to say “Russia won”, either.

We had every opportunity to fix our issues. But nope, we just never really dealt with our history of racism and all the other bigotries (and capitalism, let’s be real). When we tried to make things better, the reactionaries pushed back. First with war, and when that was lost, with law, and when that was lost, with rewriting history. That is a strategy that keeps working. Turns out if you don’t care for your citizens, they’ll eat up all that fake history looking for someone to blame. And that makes us weak to fascism.

So yeah, Russia may have sped up the process, but the roots of our downfall were here all along.