The nomenclature might change, but the methodology remains more or less the same. That the Soviets thought themselves classless Communists is given the lie by the lives lived by the proletariat compared to the lives lived by the nomenklatura.
And the lives lived by modern Russians is very different from the lives lived by modern Russian oligarchs. In other words, this is analogy and metaphor ... but the powers-that-be are still exercising the same levers of power.
Putin is an autocrat who will use any power, including defenestration, exile, prison camps, ratting by one's social peers, conscription to deadly fighting, steering state money from social needs to support of the security state, repression of the press, disappearing, and so on -- exactly as practiced by the tsars, exactly as practiced by the general secretaries of the USSR.
That they've changed the label is at this point irrelevant. Starkist or Chicken of the Sea, it's still a can of tuna.
I'm not disagreeing, just saying that the ideology fueling it, is not the same.