Putin actually does a good balancing act of acknowledging the Soviet past as well as the Tsarist past. He gets it, that your history is your history, the good and the bad, and erasing it isn’t the answer.
Also remember that Putin said that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century, and that he would love a “restored” USSR. He also compared Communism to Christianity and said that Lenin is akin to a “saint”. And, Putin has allowed the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin, something even the USSR didn’t allow from Khrushchev’s ascension to its “fall”.