MOSCOW—In Russia, the voice of America is strong again.

Alexander Nefyodov hears it every Thursday when he tunes in from the Arctic port city of Murmansk. "It's so interesting to hear from an American about how America really works," he says.

It isn't quite the radio of days past. Soviet-era beacons like Radio Liberty and the BBC have lost their place on Russian airwaves, and now the Kremlin is offering a fresher voice: Tim Kirby, an expatriate from the suburbs of Cleveland, who says he wants Russian citizenship and says Joseph Stalin was a better leader than he has been portrayed in history books.

On radio shows on Moscow's state-controlled Radio Mayak and in frequent appearances on state television, Mr. Kirby is making a name for himself inside Russia as a kind of Kremlin-appointed Joe the Plumber who explains a broken America to Russian listeners.

"We Russians think that whenever something goes bad here that it must be better in America," says Mr. Nefyodov, 25, who works in a small family wholesale grocery business. Now he says he knows "that things are worse or the same over there."