"utter monster and certainly no socialist"

AT my age I should probably know better than to engage any more with Steven but I would certainly take issue with the "no socialist" part of the statement. He was certainly a monster, as a human being, and capable of great cruelty and sadism (even in his private life and his sport of tormenting his inner circle shows) but I disagree that he was "no socialist".

In many ways his ideas followed quite plainly from Lenin's with deviations as needed to keep power (appealing to Great Russian chauvinism during World War II for instance).