Putin can try as he might, but the genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back to being the USSR.
Well, that sounds strong but Mr Putin is following Gorbachev's lead from his 1986 book, Perestroika, in which Gorby quoted Lenin saying that the Soviets should pretend to be capitalists in order to get some needed money from the "Main Adversary"( that being the USA). So whether we like it or not, whether is fits our emotional attachment to Reagan's defeat of the Evil Empire, we should face the fact that they, the communists, have a strategy that has outsmarted us.