There is a growing unrest on the ground in Russia."Simple" Or do you mean "simplistic"?
Russia in 2022 differs from the USSR in the 1980's in several important respects:
1. With the USSR, you had a multi-national, multi-ethnic empire, spanning a huge geographical spread. This made keeping control by any method other than extreme repression (eg Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) ever more difficult.
2. At the same time, there emerged relatively progressive leaders like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who recognised the inherent contradictictions and weaknesses in the USSR, but crucially weren't prepared to send in the army any more to keep control. Remember Solidarnosc in Poland, for instance? Therefore they gave up without firing a shot before "defeat" became inevitable.
3. Meanwhile, in those days, the USSR had nothing to export abroad, bar weapons to their allies in Africa etc.
4. Crucially, after Richard Nixon's "ping pong diplomacy from 1972 on, the USA managed to divert China from its former alliance with the USSR.
Whereas today, Russia is very different:
1. Whether you like it or not, Russia is a reasonably united, homegeneous and smaller state, where there is nothing like the disunity which was corroding the old USSR from within.
2. Putin doesn't give a stuff how much ordinary Russian citizens suffer, so he will run the economy into the ground to maintain personal control, backed up by the Army, Police and FSB etc.
3. As well as oil and gas, Russia today has valuable minerals and other natural resources which will still find an export market somewhere, even if at vastly reduced margins due to sanctions etc. While Russia is also a net exporter of food, which will always find a market, unlike the old USSR which had to import food from the West, or steal it from its satellite states like Poland and (ahem) Ukraine.
4. Presently, China is moving back towards an alliance with Russia, not away from them.
But yeah, apart from that, it's exactly the same....
P.S. It took 35 years of concerted pressure to bust open the USSR. It's still less than a decade since we were forging alliances with Putin - remember the G8 summit in the UK in 2013?
What people say about putin in public and in private are two different things.
Just like in the USSR days.
Wait until the Russian army runs out of steam at the end of this month.
Then the Rasputitsa comes.
It’s going to be a dark and depressing winter in Russia, the sort where plans are made.
An Arab spring is coming.