Is Putin's Russia more like the Russian Empire or Soviet Union

[SInNYC]

I'll add a reason for why Putin is more like the Russian empire even though I think its relatively minor compared to the great reasons above.

In the Soviet Union, leaders generally alternated between reformists (Lenin, Krushchev, Andropov, Gorbachev) and conservatives/establishment (Stalin, Brezhnev, Chernenko). Post-USSR and especially during Putin, this pattern doesn't hold and its been more like a monarchy, though non-hereditary.

I do think that the Soviet era alternation owed at least partly to the way one-party states make decisions, since each choice was made to negate what was considered the excesses of the previous era. Then again, China under Xi is following the same pattern as Putin (though their alternation wasnt as stark).