In his book, The Mortal Danger, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn slammed westerners like you for equating "Russian" with "Soviet." The Communists were occupiers, oppressors of the Russian people and not to be confused with one another.
Imagine how you would recoil if foreigners associated you with the democrat party.
Stalin was a Russian Nationalist, despite being Georgian, who simply continued the Foreign Policy goals of the Tsars.
Most modern Russians, who do admire Stalin, don’t think of him as a Communist.
The Communists weren’t something that fell out of the clouds into Russia one day. They were Russians. Solzhenitsyn is over rated.