The most significant event of all for Russia in the year 2000 is that the Yeltsin era is about to come to an end. Next July Russians will go to the polls to elect a new president after almost nine years of erratic, unpredictable rule in which the economy has performed disastrously and almost $3 billion per month has left the country in capital flight.
Over the same period a small number of people who made vast fortunes became so influential in ruling the country that it could be fairly stated the Yeltsin administration was operating to the detriment rather than in protection of national interest.
As Russia lurched from crisis to crisis the West looked on with some confusion. In the United States a "who lost Russia?" debate became part of the presidential election campaign in reaction to Russia's strong anti-NATO stance on Kosovo and its pursuit of the war in Chechnya in complete disregard of Western objections.
In turn, official Russia simply told its people that the West and particularly the United States had turned against them was intent on further weakening the country's role on the world stage. It may have sounded like paranoia but there was an element of truth in the claim.
Politics in the United States is particularly open to the lobby system and there is no ethnic-Russian lobby to speak of. Instead, however, a number of Americans whose origins stem from former Soviet-client states have carried an anti-Russian bias into important sectors of the policy-making establishment in Washington. Perceived US support for the ambitions of Turkey in the Balkans and the Caucasus has made Moscow more wary than ever, though in this sphere at least, strong Armenian and Greek lobbies have worked in Russia's favour.
Western policy towards Russia has been consistently pulling in two directions over the past year. One group of policymakers which has been unable to discard cold-warrior hostility to Russia per se, rather than to its former form of government, argues for containment and a weakening of Russia's international clout, while another calls for dialogue and the maintaining of good relations in the interest of promoting democracy and the market.
In the heel of the hunt Russia, in the succinct judgment of Mr Anatol Lieven from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has been offered all the restrictions attached to membership of organisations such as NATO and the EU without receiving any of the military or economic benefits that either has to offer. It is expected, for example, to accept NATO's role, including expansion towards the Baltic countries, while at the same time being excluded from the umbrella of that organisation's military protection.
The result has been a Russia whose citizens now deeply distrust the United States and its western allies in matters of foreign policy and trade while a strong desire to look eastward for allies has been developing for some time.
After the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia became perhaps the most pro-American country in the world. Admiration for US economic success was everywhere. A naive aspiration to become part of what they termed "the civilised world" dominated the thinking of almost all non-communist politicians.
A drift away from this almost sycophantic attitude has been apparent for some time but 1999 was the year in which it was finally put to rest and the single event which played the greatest part in this was NATO's military action in Kosovo.
A great deal of emphasis was placed at the time on Russia's ethnic and religious ties to Serbia but in truth these counted for little. What incensed the administration and the general public alike was NATO's usurping of powers which previously had been considered to be the preserve of the United Nations where Russia is a veto-carrying permanent member of the Security Council.
I have witnessed many demonstrations in Moscow over the past eight years. Marchers and protesters at almost all of these came from communist and right-wing backgrounds. They were middle-aged to elderly and came from the less affluent groups of society. Each demonstration became so similar to its predecessors that the faces of the participants became familiar and I even got to know some of them by name.
But Kosovo was different. The usual suspects were of course present but they were joined by young men in red-and-white Moscow Spartak football scarves and young women of around the same age. There was a genuine feeling that Russia's nose was being rubbed in the dirt and they didn't like it.
In September when massive bombs demolished apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere, killing almost 300 people as they slept, a feeling of helplessness at home augmented Russians' sense of powerlessness on the international front.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the last in a line of politicians imposed or dismissed by President Yeltsin in the course of the year, captured the mood of the occasion. Chechen warlords and Islamic Wahhabite fundamentalists were the main suspects, in Russian minds, for the bombings. Rebels had made incursions into Dagestan and were already in conflict with Russian forces.
Mr Putin, a dour former-KGB spy with a penchant for lavatory humour and criminal slang, decided on all-out war, ostensibly against "international terrorism". The first real victims were more than 200,000 who fled their homes. The West, including NATO, was appalled by the heavy handedness of it all but Russians felt that something was at last being done. Mr Putin's opinion-poll ratings skyrocketed to the extent that he became a serious contender for the presidency.
He was also seen, in the increasing absence of President Yeltsin whose further links with corrupt officials were exposed in the course of the year, as presiding over an improving economy. The collapse of 1998 had devalued the rouble and made imports dearer. Locally made produce finally began to find its place in the market. Increasing oil prices were an even greater boost.
It is not encouraging, however, that the economy is supported by such fragile pillars as oil prices and import substitutes, and a fall in foreign investment from $9.28 billion from January to September 1998 to $6.47 billion in the same period in 1999 shows that Russia's economy is still far from being in good shape.
An economic downturn and a protracted guerrilla war in the northern Caucasus could yet destroy Mr Putin's chances of the presidency but he just might make it if he can stave both these possibilities until polling day next July.