Betteridge’s Law applies.
I think any sensible person would have to answer “no”, unless one wants to promote pre-1990 Vietnam to the same level as Britain (or even Portugal) or pre-1990 Poland to the same level as Spain (in fact, Poland at the time had an economy similar in size to that of Belgium). Especially considering that China, though it did have an economic size similar to, say, France, did not have anywhere close to the industrial, technical, and export capabilities of France, it seems the USSR was the entirety of the portion of the socialist bloc with global economic importance, which is why the fall of the USSR instantly led to American unipolarity. Unlike today, much Chinese GDP in the 1970s was functionally worthless for power projection. Portugal probably had a greater ability to fight overseas wars, and even South Korea, South Africa, Sweden, Indonesia, and Brazil were each vastly more important than China in the global economy.
And the USSR was just a Communist Russia/Belarus’/Ukraine/Baltics -the rest was fairly worthless. Russia has a vastly more responsive, productive, and dynamic economy today than it did under socialism (and probably a better education system to boot). The USSR was an important regional power in Eastern and Central Europe. Elsewhere, it was scarcely more powerful than Russia is today. There’s nothing preventing Russia today from sending aid to Cuba or massive amounts of weapons and military training to Vietnam and Ethiopia. Russia could also easily spend as much on its military as the USSR did in 1980 (in absolute terms)… but why would it want to? The current government has vastly better things to do.
The key change in the status of the socialist and former socialist countries since 1980 has not been economic, but demographic -China, Poland, and Russia are a much smaller portion of the world population than they were in 1980 -and relating to state priorities.
I would disagree. Being a superpower is much more about military strength than economic strength. Though Russia today has a better economy than the USSR, it sorely lacks the strategic depth that the Warsaw Pact countries gave it. You also have to consider the fact that the USSR had the same number if not more nuclear weapons than America and vastly more than China or France. It did decline relative the US in strength over the course of the Cold War however. In the 1950s, it would have been within the realm of possibility for the USSR/Russia to forcibly drive NATO from the continent, but not in the 1980s and probably not now either. It also doesn't matter whether Russia is choosing to have less influence in the third world than the USSR did or they are simply unable to: the fact is they have less.