I will refrain from giving anecdotes (yes I am that old, but they would all be from childhood). But I would say the answer is no.

There are a few reasons for this.

One is that, whatever Putin or anyone else might say, Russia in 2021 is not even like the USSR in 1991, which was the third-biggest country by population (around 290 million), just after China and India, and which was a military superpower. The Soviet economy (very roughly speaking), was about a third the size of the US. Much, much smaller than its military weight should have been, and around Malaysia or Argentina size on a per-capita basis, but still big enough given the size of the population. In comparison, Russia now has around 145 million people (only half of the Soviet population lived in Russia, the population declined in the 1990s and then was pretty much level since), while the US has 330 million people, more than the entire USSR had in 1990. Before it's economy got destroyed this year, the Russian economy (using PPP as it's the most generous estimate) was about the size of Indonesia's or Germany's, around 4% of the global total (and on a per capita basis still around Malaysia and a bit above Argentina), while in nominal terms it's around eleventh in size (smaller than South Korea and about the size of Brazil), and in per capita terms still around Malaysia and a bit above Argentina, but below Costa Rica and China.

But back to the military - for the admitted genuine size of the Russian military today, it's not remotely like the Soviet military. Soviet defense spending was something like 15% of its GDP (which by estimates was both absolutely larger and relatively larger that the Russian economy is today), where Russian defense spending is more like 4%. The Soviet military was massive, with like 5 million people under arms in 1990 - the Russian military is under a million, and in terms of defense spending and equipment it actually had to build back after the spending and production basically flatlined in the 1990s - a lot of "new" Russian hardware are actually weapons designed in the late Soviet period and that had production halted or significantly slowed down after 1991. There were periods when countries like India were buying more Russian military hardware than the Russian military itself.

Deployment-wise the world looked very different. The USSR had a formal defense pact in Central and Eastern Europe - the Warsaw Pact (whose countries also had big militaries and their own defense industries, notably Czechoslovakia). The Soviets had something like 380,000 troops deployed in East Germany, across a fortified line from 240,000 Americans, 73,000 Brits, and 56,000 French troops. And that's not getting into the 120,000 or so East German troops and 500,000 or so West German troops serving at any given time. Heck, the Soviets had 50,000 troops based in Mongolia because of tensions with China since 1960.

The Soviet military stretch was significant, and definitely in the "superpower" realm, with friendly regimes providing bases and installations for the Soviets in Cuba, South Yemen, and Vietnam, among other places. These non-Warsaw Pact countries that were socialist states otherwise allied with the USSR also had their own substantial troop deployments, often to support one another: Cuba had some 50,000 troops in Angola and 16,000 in Ethiopia to support pro-Soviet regimes there, and Vietnam had tens of thousands of troops in Cambodia and fighting the Khmer Rouge and other US and Chinese-backed rebels. Likewise Soviet allies supported rebel movements in such places as Guatemala and El Salvador, and were close with a wide variety of socialist-but-not-with-a-communist-party countries like Nicaragua, Algeria, Iraq and Syria. The Soviet Union truly represented a "bloc" that had a strong ideological basis and presented an actual challenge to the type of world order championed by the US.

In comparison, Russia has a much diminished role. It technically is part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which is a much diminished mutual defense pact - it doesn't even include most of the former Soviet states, and is mostly a Russian-led vehicle, the other members being Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Most of these members actually rely on Russia for a military and security presence, and really only Belarus now is any sort of substantial ally in a material and political sense. Russia has links with countries around the world, it is true, but it's a much diminished presence compared to the US or China, and the only real deployment beyond former Soviet borders is in Syria.

So that's some of the big differences counting against this comparison - it's simply not a bipolar world with Moscow being the seat of the other pole (Beijing is probably the closest candidate for this in 2022). Russia does have nuclear weapons (albeit its stockpile has been reduced by 90% or so since 1990 - it has a few thousand versus tens of thousands), but I would say the scare there is different - nuclear war was an existential scare, but also literally something in a "Cold War" armed peace - Europe was at peace, and the general fear was that mutual tensions could start World War III and Armageddon. There is a hot war in Eastern Europe right now, and fears of that using radiological weapons or other WMDs but that's not quite at the level of nuclear global annihilation (and I hope it doesn't get that far). Although it's also worth noting that the Cold War went through hot and cold phases - detente in the 1970s saw peaceful coexistence, a worsening of tensions in the early 1980s led to some near-miss war scares in 1983, but after 1985 tensions drastically decreased and were replaced with diplomatic negotiations. The tensions waxed and waned.

A final point I'd say is that the interconnectivity is just totally different, especially with mobile phones, the internet, and social media. A Cold War hot war in Afghanistan didn't have the same kind of immediate coverage one can get nowadays, with sides having social media presences and videos readily available. Personally I've been texting and calling people in Russia and that would have been just completely unthinkable in 1990 - international calls alone were hard to do, heavily centralized, and heavily monitored. It's just a completely different global ecosystem of information (and disinformation), and communication (which also includes anxiety-producing direct footage of conflicts and social media information silos).