I'm not sure it would have been plausible to expect better advice. Poland, for instance, had made a relative success of shock therapy, returning to economic growth as early as 1992. Most expected a turnaround in Eurasia that would not be much less rapid--the Baltic States, for instance, managed to keep pace with the central Europeans. The depth of the post-Soviet economic depression, and its length, was not something many had expected.
Much of the shock would have been inevitable. I think that the space of the Soviet Union may have been saved from worse than OTL because of the political independence of the different units. What if these republics remained yoked together while the Soviet/Eurasian economy was falling apart? Yugoslavia had seen less economic dysfunction, and rivalry, in the 1980s, and look how that ended up. If different republics in a union were competing for scarce and diminishing resources and blaming each other, things could have gone very badly. As independent states, the different Soviet successor states only had themselves to blame.
Going back to the original WI, of a federation of Russia with Belarus and the Central Asian republics, I'm skeptical that Russia would have been behind it. With Ukraine included, the Union would have made some sense by way of burden-sharing. Without Ukraine, Russia would find itself the dominant player in a union with kindred but much smaller Belarus, with a half-Russian Kazakhstan, and with much poorer Central Asian republics. Russia would have been in the position of financing the union and probably all of the smaller republics.