> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation.

I think it is worth pointing out that Stalin and Beria were actually Georgian, not Russian. Additionally, the architect of what was later known as the KGB was a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the Dzerzhinsky entry in Wikipedia about an exchange with Lenin (who was actually Russian) on the question of Soviet policy on nationalities,

   April 1917 Party Conference, when Lenin accused Dzerzhinsky of Great-Russian chauvinism, he replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists."

Today Putin often says that Vladimir Lenin is responsible for giving national minorities the freedoms they continue to enjoy today (some in form of independent statehood). He says this in a negative tone, and often equates it to placing a nuclear bomb under Russia.

My reason for pointing this out is that Soviet history is really peculiar and one has to be careful with saying Soviet = Russian.