Chris is in a better position to answer that question than those of us who love in the US, but I suspect that Stalin nostalgia derives from two different sources: one source being the desire for order, for a return to the days when the Soviet Union was a superpower. And the other source being the desire to return to a more egalitarian society. Many of today's Stalin fans do seem to be "browns" who admire him for his having governed with an iron hand but I think that for a lot of people in Russia, the nostalgia for Stalin represents a protest of the politics of the last decade, in which Russian leaders have sought to break up the Soviet welfare state, and replace it with a form of capitalism. No doubt, many Russians are nostalgic for Stalin on both grounds.
Jim F. --- A final word on the subject:
Hitler was the consumate loser. He led Germany on a path of ruination. Stalin, on the other hand, was the builder par excellence. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union beat the most dangerous, most viscerally aggressive military machine in the world, achieved a 99.9% literacy rate and transformed from a backwards peasant society into an industrial powerhouse. That's nothing to sneeze at. Those are amazing accomplishments, and they are things people in the FSU do and should take pride in. And those things are forever linked with the name and face of Joseph Stalin. Of course he is looked upon differently than in the West.
I think that, in another couple of hundred years or so, he will be looked upon in the popular mind similarly to the figure in Russian history who most resembles him: Peter the Great, another ruthless, brutal modernizer. In terms of percentage of the population, Peter the Great killed more people than Stalin did. I have little doubt that monuments to Stalin will be going up in Russia in another century or so, maybe sooner.