>>17905317
>Being able to do social manipulation better does not make you ultimately more intelligent, it just shows your social skills. A retard 80 IQ can outmanoeuvre someone genuinely intelligent socially in a high school environment. Stalin was genuinely not intelligent. He was a thourough midwit
I think this is probably right. If Stalin was intelligent it was in his social intelligence I guess. I think he was a psychopath. I've read some accounts from people who met him personally. Milovan Djilas is an excellent source on this because he had several long meetings with him, and he would say he was good at reading people, and disarming people, and making them feel close to him. (That was dangerous.) He was funny, and a good listener. He was also very short and his appearance would be suprising, because you'd be walking through the Kremlin (which was kept pretty spartan when Stalin lived there) and then suddenly be greeted by this Georgian midget smoking a pipe. But he really only saw two types of people: obedient subjects and enemies.

>>17905399
>Lenin was more intelligent and accomplished than Marx, who was just a nerd with lofty theories. Lenin actually applied said theories to IRL
Marx was more of a scientist. Lenin was more of a revolutionary, which made him more dogmatic. Lenin was a really outstanding and militantly certain dogmatist and he helped to turn Marxism into a dogma. If it didn't correspond with Marxism, Lenin wasn't interested in it. But he didn't have much of a background in philosophy. Marx did.

>>17905661
Read this letter from Mao to Jiang Qing, it's like he did the Cultural Revolution because he expected the rightists to take power after he died, so he wanted to create a basis for the left to challenge them in the future, it's wild:
https://www.bannedthought.net/China/Individuals/MaoZedong/Letters/Mao'sLetterToJiangQing-660708-Alt1-sm.pdf