While Stalin was a thug, I don't think he was a sociopath (unless you're just using the word to mean "totally ruthless"). By all accounts he had close relationships with his wives and his daughter (not so much with his sons), not something sociopaths do.
--- On Fri, 4/24/09, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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