As someone who has had Russian history and currently still posesses a book called 'The Book for Future Admirals' (aimed at 10-14 year old kids, part of the school history 'recommended reading list' as per 1994), I can only answer what was said in the book and my limited personal experience with the history lessons. The book covers the period from before WW2 to the end of 1970, and mostly focuses on the military aspects.

Stalin is being portrayed as a good leader and a very powerful authority figure, and his government as a strong leadership who helped bring the war to a succesful end. The massacres and gulag sendoffs are not explicitly mentioned but often inferred during the book. There are stories of how the war commanders like Zhukov had to fight Stalin to get what they wanted, or how his negative decisions affected them and the war. By accounts of many generals in the war, he often asked the impossible from his people, but was not completely unreasonable when given mass rebuttal(the infamous and very short lived order to shoot retreating soldiers in the back is an excellent example. Very few commanders actually did it and forced him to back down from it.) Overall, he is posed as someone who did a lot of good for the country and brought a measure of stability to it. But there is certainly a hanging sidenote of 'horrible person' permeating every good deed he did.

TL:DR: There is praise for his accomplishments in bringing the country together, but always with an undertone that he was a horrible person. Maybe not on the same level as Hitler, but a good second.

If mods want proof of me having the book, dated 1976, I can provide a photo. I'm otherwise purely a military enthusiast with no historical degree. My experience here comes from reading and researching the many wars in the world.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the influence of politics on current pedagogical practices in Russian high schools, specifically as it relates to teaching history. My primary source was the book "A Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: Manual For Teachers." by A.V. Filippov et. all. Here is an article that appeared in the Economist in 2007 that contains some interesting information about this textbook, especially the controversy surrounding its writing and subsequent release. The book is used nationally as the cannon for teaching history to Russian high school students, and obviously includes vast information about Stalin.

In general, Stalin's actions are not excused but justified to students. Unlike previous textbooks that tended to gloss over the Kremlin's purges, Filippov's book rationalizes the destruction of millions of Soviet citizens as a sort of "just" retribution. In The History of Russia textbook, the authors instruct Russian educators on how to approach Stalin in the classroom: "It is important to show that Stalin acted in a concrete historical situation…entirely rationally—as the guardian of a system, as a consistent supporter of reshaping the country into an industrialized state." The authors of the book seem to realize that the purges of the 1930's cannot be categorized as entirely "rational," so they take their description one step further by redefining what constitutes a victim of repression: "We believe it would be correct to use a formula here that would include only persons condemned to death and executed. This will enable us to move away from the kind of exploitation of this issue in which everyone was counted as a victim of repression…" So who does not count as a victim of repression under this formula? Anyone who lost his job for political reasons; anyone who was expelled from the Young Communist League or the party; anyone who died in a labor camp; and anyone who died after being deported or as the result of deportation does not count. Stalin's management of the Ukrainian hunger crisis is also grossly misrepresented, with the authors saying, "According to updated figures, the number in Ukraine [who died of hunger] was not 10 million, as Ukrainian historians write today, but no more than 1 or 2 million." That's just a small sample of the information contained in the textbook, but it illustrates in general the approach that Russia is currently taking toward Stalin in the classroom. Another important factor to keep in mind in this discussion is the nationalized Russian school system. Unlike the U.S. where states have differing "core" requirements for the information students should receive in school Russian students receive the same instruction in history whether they live in St. Petersburg or Vladivostok. Thus I can say with some certainty that the ideas expressed in "A Modern History of Russia" are taught on a national scale. I'll leave you with this quote, directly from the textbook itself: "We must make every school-child aware of the grandeur of our struggle and our victories; we must show him the cost of these great successes in labor and blood; we must tell him how great the people of our epoch—Lenin, Stalin, and their companions in arms—organized the workers in the struggle for a new and happy life. Our youth must be trained in militant readiness for the defense of their socialist fatherland." (p. 37)

Edit: TL;DR: Russia uses the same, controversial high school textbook across their nationalized education system. The textbook acknowledges many of Stalin's actions and often attempts to justify them.