For all the obvious similarities between Vladimir Putin and Soviet dictators—from stage-managed party congresses to farcical “elections”—the regime in Moscow was at least shy to admit the likeness publicly. No longer, it seems. In a television interview last week, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, not only accepted the comparison of his boss to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, but readily embraced it. “Brezhnev was not a negative for our country’s history,” Peskov opined to his interviewers’ disbelief, “He was a huge positive.”

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The “huge positives” Putin’s spokesman was presumably referring to include the jailing of hundreds of political prisoners; the widespread use of “punitive psychiatry” to silence dissenters and human rights activists; the persecution of Andrei Sakharov; the forced exile of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky; the introduction of the Constitution’s Article 6, which institutionalized the one-party state; the crushing of the Prague Spring; and the invasion of Afghanistan. Peskov’s praise of Brezhnev as the leader who “laid the foundations for the economy and agriculture” is equally puzzling. Between 1970 and 1980, grain imports into the USSR rose by thirteen times, and the external agricultural trade deficit increased from $1 billion to $16.3 billion. By 1980, most of the Soviet Union’s revenues from oil and gas exports were spent on importing food and basic consumer goods, which nevertheless remained a scarcity for the vast majority of Soviet citizens who did not have access to exclusive nomenklatura stores. According to Alexei Ponomarenko, associate professor at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, the last year the RSFSR’s economy grew at a high rate—8 percent—was 1973, when the world oil crisis helped increase Soviet energy exports.

The only “foundations” Brezhnev laid were for an inefficient, over-militarized, and export-dependent economy that collapsed a few years after his death. By no measure can his eighteen-year rule (from 1964 to 1982) be considered a success, let alone a “huge positive.” For most Russians, it was a time of political freeze and economic stagnation, remembered mainly for the flourishing jokes about “Dear Leonid Ilyich.” A typical one: Brezhnev sees a man carrying a watermelon. He stops the car and asks the man to sell the watermelon to him. The man replies: “No problem, just pick the one you want.” When Brezhnev asks: “How can I pick when there is only one?” the man replies: “That’s how we elected you.”

Vladimir Putin—in power for twelve years and determined to stay for another twelve—is already close to Brezhnev’s record. Whether he breaks it, however, is an open question. For all the political similarities, Russia’s society today is very different than it was in the 1970s. The population of Internet users—60 million strong and growning—will, sooner or later, make government censorship of television irrelevant. And the more official “election” results diverge from the public mood—this summer, just 27 percent of Russians wanted to see Putin as a presidential candidate—the slimmer the regime’s chances of survival. “I have a surreal feeling,” Vladimir Bukovsky remarked after Putin’s announcement of a new presidential term. “They talk about 12 years, 24 years. But the regime has entered its final round … I had a friend who received a 25-year prison sentence in 1953. He was out within six months.”