you see this is where you are wrong. studying non-politically motivated historical accounts a little better can easily fix that.
russians (as well as other nations within ussr) are also the victims of communist ideology which been imposed onto them from abroad (in fact from thinkers in great britain - the only monarchy left standing after ww1). then after coup that toppled czar in process foreign secret services (mostly british) organised a takeover of petrograd (now st piterburg) with introduction of communist ideology as a main sell point for confused and mislead public. trocki came from britain where he was trained. lenin came from switzerland together with paid international mercenaries and idea driven european communists (mostly ethnical jews). then to take the rest of the country the red army was established which was guided by the secret services and heavily sponsored by the wall street capital. once they won the war total destruction, theft, corruption and holodomor came to further break the country and extract wealth from it for western capital. mass murder became norm and huge citizen imprisonments followed, concentration camps were created, hunger etc. when stalin started to fight back for sovereignty he only managed to achieve that after 15 years walking along razor's edge exterminating the fifth column (or anyone related to it) - it was the only way, too much was being put at stake and too little time to achieve that. he was brutal man, but considering the circumstances he did manage to achieve the independence from the bankers

after the final purges of 37-38. by the way stalin wasnt even marksist - its believed he had very tight links with few of the remaining generals loyal to czar within military who seen stalin as the only solution to save russia from globalists. when bankers realised that they lost the strings to pull inside ussr, plan b had to be implemented and unleash hitler dog on stalin. as a result of ww2 brits completely exhausted themselves and pound sterling lost its reserve status to be passed onto usd and carry on the fight into cold war following the bretton woods.......

...so as you can see the fight goes on. for better or worse time will tell. but after losing cold war and total collapse and pillage of russia thought nineties people refuse to be defeated. they have the right to fight for their independence from russian/zionist oligarchy & international globalists. the reason putin is so popular now is because he is the only straw that russians have to save themselves - and results are already very clear. he was placed there by the globalists but he cheated them over and created his own patriotic ideology which is by the way extremely democratic and fair. the reason why ukraine is suffering still is because the oligarchy has completely exhausted the soviet inheritance and draind everything they could off the people without putting anything back into the system. the zionist oligarchs which are the most powerful entities in ukraine are the ones controlling the mass media and poisoning ukrainians even abroad....