Unwinding a communist system is incredibly difficult and always yields a collapse in living standards, although temporary. Less extreme forms of it are often called "shock therapy" for this reason, but Russia's transition was handled especially badly and was especially extreme as the dissolution of the USSR wasn't a planned event.
If you look at opinion polls, a significant fraction of the Russian population does wish for a return to the Soviet system. You will also find some nostalgia in the former DDR. This isn't because they thought it was a perfect or good system, but the memory of the collapse and return to market competition is painful, and of course some of them are naturally left leaning anyway and liked a world where there was no competitive pressures.
Yugoslav nostalgia is very popular as well, so much it has a name: yugonostalgia. The movie Underground[1] by acclaimed director Emir Kusturica is a fabulous study of this phenomenon and a fantastic movie on its own.
Indeed it's always amusing that whenever the Western media talks about Russian political opposition to Putin they almost never mention the Communist party despite it's consistently strong polling.
Back to Putin - I see him as harking back to pre-communist Russian empire days, rather than the Soviet Union per se.
So he is in the same camp as people in the UK who are nostalgic about the British empire.
"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains"
https://aforisimo.ru/30185.html
Unwinding a communist system is incredibly difficult and always yields a collapse in living standards, although temporary. Less extreme forms of it are often called "shock therapy" for this reason, but Russia's transition was handled especially badly and was especially extreme as the dissolution of the USSR wasn't a planned event.
If you look at opinion polls, a significant fraction of the Russian population does wish for a return to the Soviet system. You will also find some nostalgia in the former DDR. This isn't because they thought it was a perfect or good system, but the memory of the collapse and return to market competition is painful, and of course some of them are naturally left leaning anyway and liked a world where there was no competitive pressures.