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As with the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution replaced a ramshackle, traditional authoritarian system with one based on a naked struggle for power, wide scale terror, and the mass liquidation and imprisonment of enemies. Millions who lived through those changes secretly yearned for the prior regime.

While Lenin was genuinely a revolutionary determined to spread Communism, Stalin was more narrowly and ruthlessly focused on personal power and the development of a commanding, centralized Russian state. HBO's 1992 production Stalin starring Robert Duvall seems the most accurate film portrayal to date. Stalin comes across as the crude leader of a gang of thugs, quite unlike the diffident, well-mannered Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas II.

As you suggest, such differences can be disregarded so as to recognize commonalities between the Tsarist and Soviet regimes that are not unlike those between the French Bourbon monarchy and Napoleon. In both examples, there is a dedication to centralized state power, absolutist personal rule, and systematic suppression of dissent and resistance of any sort. The laws and prisons of the French monarchy and the Tsars were less brutal than those of their revolutionary successors, but they were prisons nonetheless.

He didn’t recreate the Tsarist system, he tore it down and tried to make it into an anarchist state. Remember, he insisted on gutting literally ANY law and order at all, insisting on it even AFTER being forced to implement the NEP. Stalin you could argue tried to recreate the Tsarist system, but solely due to pragmatism on his part (Lenin’s unlimited abortion legalization and rampant promotion of homosexuality within Russia forced Stalin to put a restraint on it to prevent Russia itself from going extinct).

What Lenin desired, let alone implemented, was something MUCH worse than the Tsarist system.