Yep. Not much to distinguish Stalin from Ivan the Terrible. Why they would ever consider returning to that is beyond me
I don’t think they’re contemplating return to that “Autocrat of all the Russias ” stuff.
Ivan the Terrible didn't deliberately starve to death 9 million Ukrainians. Ivan didn't send out NKVD agents to a district with a quota of people they had to arrest and execute for "spying". Ivan didn't murder several thousand Polish officers and nobles and then lie about it for decades. Ivan the Terrible, as far as I know, did not have a secret police head who was a rapist and a serial murderer of teenage girls who refused his attentions. (And Stalin knew about what Beria did, and did nothing. The bones of some of Beria's victims have been dug up at the Tunisian embassy in Moscow, which was Beria's house.)
I can go on.
The worst thing Ivan did, in terms of mass murder, was probablky the massacre of Novgorod. Some historians think the actual death toll from that may have been as low as 3,000. Three thousand corpses was a nice week's work for Stalin's NKVD. A day's work at some points.