Stalin's ideology was Marxism-Leninism, Putin's is a commitment to a revived "Russian world", defined in terms of traditional culture and Orthodox Christianity, though with a distinct lack of emphasis on Jesus' Sermon on the the Mount. From Putin's perspective, Ukraine has special significance, with historical roots going back to Vladimir the Great, the Grand Prince of Kiev, who introduced Orthodox Christianity to the Russian domain in 988 AD.
Sebag Montefiore argues that key elements of the old Soviet governance structure persisted into the post-Soviet era, especially the secret police service , though with a new set of initials (FSB vs KGB), that remained largely intact and was crucial to Putin's rise to power.
Putin has gone on the record, including in his long pre-war speech that attempted to justify the invasion, condemning the "excesses:" of Stalin's rule, while effectively forbidding ongoing examination of Stalin's crimes and legacy.
In one key respect, however, he has shown himself to be more dangerous than Stalin. The author contends that Stalin was strategically cautious, and would have been unlikely to have attempted something like the Ukraine invasion.
By the way Sebag Montefiore's book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a terrific read.
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This is no surprise because the modern Russian state that Stalin forged in the early 1920s was never dismantled in the democratic turbulence of the 1990s. Despite its democratic façade, the Russian executive remained an autocracy in which presidents – similar to early tsars – chose their own successors as both Boris Yeltsin and Putin have done. The security organisation founded by Lenin, the Cheka, shaped and micromanaged by Stalin, and known by a succession of dreary acronyms – OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB, FSB – was divided by Yeltsin but never disassembled.
A former KGB lieutenant colonel, Putin is a proud Chekist. Then there is Ukraine, a country that was brutally repressed by Stalin and now attacked by Putin. The Russian president shares a part of Stalin’s determination to liquidate the nationality and independence of Ukraine at any cost. The differences between the two are as great as the similarities. But perhaps it is the similarities that count today.
But the differences are striking too. Stalin was a Georgian, born with the surname Dzhugashvili. Putin, born in Leningrad, emphasised in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine “I’m a Russian”. Stalin was a fanatical internationalist Marxist; Putin believes in the exceptionalist “Russian world” starting with the Orthodox conversion of Vladimir the Great in 988. He despises Marxist ideology, believing the Leninist revolution shattered Russian imperium. Eschewing Communism, he promotes Kremlin-KGB-capitalism. Stalin, who had no interest in money and only possessed a couple of uniforms (though he enjoyed the use of comfortable mansions) would be disgusted by the vulgarity of the yachts and planes of Russia’s ultra-rich.
Although Communism is gone, Stalin’s secret police force is intact and remains central to Putin’s reign. Stalin deliberately co-opted Russian criminal culture into the Cheka, personifying this gangster-Bolshevik nexus himself. He won Lenin’s favour by organising bank robberies with a gang of mafiosi and psychopaths in order to fund the Party. When a fastidious Marxist complained to Lenin about Stalin’s thuggery, he replied, “He’s exactly the type we need.” Putin has a special link: his grandfather Spiridon Putin was a chef who started at the Astoria Hotel in St Petersburg, where he cooked for Rasputin, but then joined the OGPU/ NKVD “service staff” who worked at state dachas, serving Lenin and Stalin himself. As a young law student, Putin joined the KGB in 1975. During Leonid Brezhnev’s sclerotic reign (1964 to 1982), the KGB under the talented Yuri Andropov was the only organisation that retained its prestige as an order of “Soviet knighthood”. In 1991 Putin was working as a KGB lieutenant colonel in Dresden, east Germany when the Soviet Union collapsed. He drove home despondent.