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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Almost done reading Stalin's work on dialectical and historical materialism. Really well-written, I love how he quotes Marx/Engels for relavant passages and gives examples. Surprisingly he's way more chill than i expected in writing; nothing like Marx/Engels/Lenin lol.
Yea, one of the most jarring things about reading Stalin is that he's cool, calm, and collected, and has a fairly dry sense of humor from time to time. He's very different from the sassy and fiery Lenin, the angry and often literary Marx, the proud and millitant Mao, or the sarcastic but optimistic Engels. Stalin's writing is almost gentle in comparison, and extremely clear, which makes his works very valuable educational material.
His lack of dry uncle humor in his works compared to the others is 30x worse than anything the black book could ever say about him ๐ฟ
Well to be fair this is my first read of anything he wrote, perhaps the treasure awaits in his other works
I know Anarchism or Socialism? is a bit more humorous, but yea, this is pretty much how his writings are! You can kind of put together why he was elected and widely supported, he was generally quiet, soft-spoken, but very skilled at getting people to speak up while gently prodding the conversation in productive directions, then coming to a clear conclusion.
Where Lenin was very often on the attack, with sharp critique and fiery rhetoric, Stalin was, contrary to his common depictions, reserved and collaborative in most occasions. His works on the National question and linguistics are similarly structured and written, same with Foundations of Leninism.