Based on what a read there is a large segment of the population that longs for the 'good old days' under Stalin.
The transition from the time when the state was taking care of everything even if the people didn't have didn't go well. It changed overnight and left allot of people behind. So I kind of get it.
The ironic thing is that most of his support is coming from their version of the Baby Boomers. And there is an important thing to remember about Russia's production capabilities coming out of WW2.
You might have heard of this program the Americans started in March of 1941 and ran until the conclusion of WW2. It was called Lend-Lease. In addition to all of the production and material support we provided to the Russians, the Americans did one other thing in order to better optimize the kinds of support the Russians would need.
They sent production engineers into Russia to help them streamline and improve their domestic production capabilities. Because the more material they could produce domestically meant that other material support options opened up where Lend-Lease was concerned. In some respects, there are present day parallels that could be drawn with present day China, just over a much longer time scale in China's case.
Leap-frogging off of that Allied support from the 1940's (mostly just doing the equivalent of copy/past all over the Soviet Union) it gave the Soviets several decades of rapid industrialization and improvement in living conditions(which their baby boomers remember all too well), even if it didn't keep pace with "the west." With them even putting their own spin on things on sometimes iterating into some improved variants of their own... But eventually "state of the art 1940's" processes weren't sufficient for the Soviet Union to continue to dominate by the 1980's, although they were still plenty scary in the 1960's, 70's, and 80's. In hindsight, we know they pretty much peaked in the early 80's, arguably the 1970's all considered.
Apparently people memories our short (as seen in the Philippines)
Not sure what you mean about the Philippines? I've been ignoring the news though, so I guess it must be something recent.