In a vindication of sorts for Stalin’s victims – as many as 20 million – a Moscow district court last week ruled against the dictator’s grandson, who sued a Russian newspaper for calling him a “bloodthirsty criminal.” But the verdict, while a welcome sign, does not undo the disturbing fact that many Russians’ still give the Soviet leader high approval ratings. Nor does it reverse efforts by the Kremlin to rehabilitate one of the twentieth century's most ruthless leaders.

In a July 2006 speech, then-President Vladimir Putin told Russians they “shouldn’t feel guilty” about Stalin’s purges. He also accused Western academics of downplaying Moscow’s role in ending World War II and exaggerating the atrocities committed by Stalin. Putin had previously made waves by calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” and reinstating the Soviet national anthem.

The Kremlin, some experts say, has sought to polish up its Soviet past in an effort to reassert itself on the world stage and restore national pride among Russians. Unlike post-apartheid South Africa or post-Nazi Germany, Russia has never fully come to terms with the darker chapters of its past or ever established a truth commission to investigate Soviet-era atrocities. Some say neo-Stalinist attitudes are partly responsible for Russia’s tougher posture toward countries like Ukraine and Georgia, as well as for its prickly dealings with the United States.

During the Bush years, the Kremlin’s attempts to gloss over Soviet history dovetailed with rising anti-Western attitudes among Russians. “There is a steady drip, drip, drip coming from the Kremlin and on Russian television that is intensely anti-American,” says Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “[Russians] increasingly view the United States as more of a threat than China or Iran. Plus, there is this rejection of seeing Russia as part of the Euro-Atlantic community.” The Bush-era plan to place a missile defense system in Central Europe and open NATO’s door to Ukraine and Georgia corresponded with a spike in Russian nationalism and anti-Western rhetoric. Yet with the new administration in Washington promising to “reset relations” and put the kibosh on the missile shield, the inflammatory rhetoric has softened some, while Stalin seems to receive fewer shout-outs from the Kremlin these days.

But there has still been no full-scale investigation of Stalin-era atrocities. A few inquiries of past purges were launched by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late 1980s, and monuments to gulag victims were erected. “The high point of official truth telling was under Gorbachev,” says Stephen Cohen of New York University. “He believed the [gulag] system needed dismantling and he had to discredit the era in which the system was created. Gorbachev and [Politburo member and Kremlin adviser] Alexander Yakovlev had a very profound moral allergy to Stalinism.” Both of Gorbachev’s grandparents were deported by Stalin to Siberian labor camps. His denunciation of the system echoed Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 secret speech in which he spoke out against Stalinism, which ushered in an era of de-Stalinization. But Gorbachev’s attempt to denounce Stalin did not go far enough. Marshall Goldman of Harvard University says he is surprised a more serious effort to prosecute crimes from that era was not made. “How can you come back from a camp and live next door to the person who sent you to the camp?” he asks. “That mystifies me.”

After Gorbachev exited the political stage, Boris Yeltsin picked up on his predecessor’s efforts to investigate past atrocities and rehabilitate victims. The KGB, Russia’s state security agency, was dismantled (or rather folded into the FSB). Archives were opened—albeit partially—and a series of trials were held. But as Richard Pipes, an historian at Harvard who attended the trials and provided expert testimony, told me a few years ago, “Nothing happened. No one was arrested or tried.” There were sporadic, mostly bottom-up efforts to create a truth commission to investigate Soviet atrocities, in addition to the work of Russian human rights groups like Memorial, but nothing of substance materialized. “It‘s a very difficult thing to repudiate seventy years of Russian history,” says Pipes. “They did this in Germany and Japan but we were the occupying power then.”

Some sites of former gulags have been preserved or made into museums and Russia has erected a few memorials to the victims of Stalin’s purges, including a statue erected in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, but Pipes says “it’s a pitiful thing” that pales in size to a similar statue in Washington, DC. “The whole idea of having a monument to victims of communism is something that makes people [in Russia] mad," says Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations. "They don’t see it as a principle of national reconciliation.”