My dog desperately wants to make friends with the possum in the yard, and I am the mean man who is trying to keep him isolated as a tool of control due to underlying authoritarian tendencies and deep seeded insecurity.
Stalin was useful strategically to people with power until he was able to rally a large enough base to have power of his own, while largely being viewed as a non-threat by everyone around him.
Stalin's success came from being more of a psychopath than anyone ever estimated. He was physically unimposing and viewed as beneath the intellect of almost everyone else in revolutionary leadership.
His rivals underestimated him, and overestimated the general value of intellectualism.
I have at this point mainlined nearly every notable English language biography of Stalin from J. T. Murphy up to Ronald Grigor Suny.
Stalin is kind of the opposite of the competence porn genre. Every story is of a man thinking magically in order to justify whatever action he wanted.
One of the problems with the short video pipeline to exposure is that it becomes very easy to only see clips from a person who is a complete whack job in which they seem incredibly, reasonable, curious and interesting.