Geoffrey Roberts Vladimir Bekhterev Soviet Union Bolshevik Bolsheviks Leninist
Stalin was ruthless, temperamentally cruel, and had a propensity for violence high even among the Bolsheviks. He lacked compassion, something Volkogonov suggested might have been accentuated by his many years in prison and exile, although he was capable of acts of kindness to strangers, even amid the Great Terror. He was capable of self-righteous indignation, and was resentful, and vindictive, holding on to grudges for many years. By the 1920s, he was also suspicious and conspiratorial, prone to believing that people were plotting against him and that there were vast international conspiracies behind acts of dissent. He never attended torture sessions or executions, although Service thought Stalin "derived deep satisfaction" from degrading and humiliating people and enjoyed keeping even close associates in a state of "unrelieved fear". Montefiore thought Stalin's brutality marked him out as a "natural extremist"; Service suggested he had tendencies toward a paranoid and sociopathic personality disorder. According to historian Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin wasn't a psychopath. He was instead an emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual. Other historians linked his brutality not to any personality trait, but to his unwavering commitment to the survival of the Soviet Union and the international Marxist–Leninist cause. Conversely, historian E.A. Rees believed that there was a strong argument in the case of Stalin "that it was psychopathy that breed tyranny". Rees cited a diagnosis performed by neuropathologist Vladimir Bekhterev on Stalin in 1927 and  who had described him as a "typical case of severe paranoia".
