“It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake,” so spoke Napoleon’s police chief Joseph Fouche upon learning about the execution of a Bourbon prince on Napoleon’s orders. Napoleon’s swift justice was supposed to deliver a blow to his adversaries — a win — but instead antagonized the rest of Europe.

The Helsinki summit was a win for Putin, as shockwaves from Trump’s kowtowing to the Russian president spread on both sides of the Atlantic. Putin must have left Helsinki thinking that he had just scored another big win against his U.S. counterpart mired in the Kremlin-provoked criminal investigation back home. 'Mission accomplished!' Or is it? Will the decline of the West and the dismantling of the U.S.-led liberal international order so desired by Putin, and so eagerly facilitated by Trump, be good for Russia? Was the post-Cold War period of Western dominance as harmful to Russia as the Kremlin has been telling its citizens and the rest of the world? And what is likely to replace it?

A longstanding staple of the Kremlin’s narrative is that the West exploited Russia’s domestic troubles and retreat from the world stage in the 1990s. According to the Russian version of events, Russia was too weak to resist the West's trampling of its interests and relentless geopolitical expansion at Russia’s expense. As Russian domestic politics stabilized and the economy recovered on Putin’s watch, the Kremlin began to stand up to the West in defense of its interests. In Moscow’s telling, it had no choice but to go to war twice — in Georgia and in Ukraine — to stop the West’s onslaught.

But was the era of U.S.-led Western dominance really so bad for Russia? No denying, the 1990s were a horrible decade for it, but that was hardly the West’s fault. In fact, the West acted as Russia’s principal source of desperately needed aid when its economy collapsed. Marshaling billions of dollars to bail out Russia was one of the key policy priorities for Western governments for more than a decade. Western advisors, much maligned for their supposedly faulty advice to the Russian government, played a crucial role in designing and implementing badly needed economic reforms.

Far from perfect, Western technical assistance paid off for Russia even before oil prices began to climb around the turn of the century and lifted the Russian economy. Putin’s economic miracle would have been impossible without those reforms and the West’s financial and technical help.