Putin is a clever, intelligent person. He know who Tucker’s audience is, he knows he’s not speaking to some vast movement of communists in the west but to isolationist reactionaries, paleoconservatives, etc and he’s tailored his messaging for this. It’s not that different from his own base of traditionalist reactionary conservatives in Russia so it’s not that hard.

Putin is not a communist and even if he were, his job in an interview like this would not be best served by defending the image of the USSR. I did find it interesting he mentioned at one point in his historical monologue at the start (first 30 minutes) how he’d looked in the Soviet archives and found the communist party was sincere and honest in its approach to other nations in the period around the Great Patriotic War (WW2). He omits bothering to speculate (or chooses not to for the sake of his audience) on motives of the USSR multiple times, simply putting it down as Lenin did this for reasons and Stalin did this for reasons and so on.

It is interesting as he mentions Stalin he says claims of crimes under him rather than just straight up saying crimes but there is something to be said that Stalin is very popular in Russia even today and bad-mouthing him, even in a foreign media press may go against ingrained instincts he’s since developed. Still, more fair to Stalin than just about anyone in the west could be.

As to the OP mentioning, “I like how Putin clarified that Soviet Ukrainianization and indigenization of other areas of the USSR was not a bad policy in principle” I think this is best read as reactionary nationalist stuff. Basically that people of a culture should stick together, that there’s a duty to blood there, to preserving culture, to a commonality. You hear the same stuff from many reactionary thinkers.

Edit: At about 38 minutes mark Tucker asks Putin about how US presidents seemed to be open to something then after talking to their cabinets and CIA, changed their tune, Tucker asking if this means basically that the elected US presidents aren’t really running the show (deep state narrative) and Putin agrees cautiously with this and then moves on.

Edit2: At 1hour, 23minutes he tells Tucker that it is to his own detriment (US detriment) that they are limiting cooperation with China.

Edit3 At around 1h 32minutes Putin mentions a hypothesis that power centers/think tanks that specialized on the Soviet Union after it’s break-up continued their jobs, he mentions specifically their desire to engineer the break-up of Russia and subjugation of its component pieces in order to use their resources against China.

Also just to get back to the very start of the interview, he tells Tucker he’s going to give some background and tells him it will take a minute, 90 seconds and proceeds to talk about it for half an hour, lmao. I guess it is nice they didn’t cut that.