Just because someone's a jerk doesn't mean they're not worth reading. Apart from the historical interest, though, I don't really see what's to be gained from reading Lenin today, unless you take capitalism to be some kind of timeless object trapped in amber since 1917.
I find Lenin if anything a more frightening personality than Stalin. Stalin was understandable because he was a sociopathic thug. Lenin was no sociopath and he had all the trappings of profound intelligence - an appreciation of irony and contradiction, and so on. I think he's like Hayek in Keynes' estimation: an outstanding example of how a logician starting from a wrong premise can end up in Bedlam. He was a fine logician but the religious brand of Marxism that served as his premise led him to Bedlam, only with firing squads and secret police instead of white jackets and butterfly nets.
There's something both tragic and comic about Lenin. He ended his days despairing over the catastrophe that was his revolution but he never once seemed to grasp that it was the logical consequence of his lifelong worldview, in which human beings are seen to be equivalent to automatons. Robot freedom-riders, so to speak. That should have been the Bolsheviks' slogan: "We Are the Robot Freedom Riders!"
SA