Well...there’s not a darn thing wrong with national pride. We could use a bit more right here in the USofA, IMO. The error of Putin’s ways lies in his indoctrination by the KGB that the true glory of Russia was during the era of the Soviet Union.
The rich history of Russia is much deeper than the Soviet Era. The Russian people know that. They need to find a way to mitigate the influence of Putin and the holdover Commies who are returning to positions of authority.
The problem is that Russians should not be proud of their nation. They should be ashamed of their nation, and they should be ashamed of themselves. Putin makes his people proud like Hitler made Germans proud, by telling them big lies. Putin tells them that they are a great civilization destined to lead the world, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
Are they proud of the Gulag? Are they proud of starving millions of Ukrainians to death in the early 1930s? Russia isn’t the just the victim of communism; it’s also one of the main collaborators. For every Solzhenitsyn, there were brainless, amoral party hacks like Putin who made the state function like the death machine that it was. You’re right to identify Putin as part of the problem, though he dose have a fan club of nitwit blowhards on FreeRepublic, but the Russians have never come to grips with the horrors they inflicted on their neighbors during the communist years.