You didn't say "Stalin was more like a mafia don, and Lenin was more like a statesman", though even there I don't agree. Lenin, as I pointed out above, used chemical weapons on peasants who refused to give up their grain and starve. Everything Stalin did had been done by Lenin before, including rounding up and executing political enemies without any trial, or with only a farce of a trial. Lenin just had the "fortune" of dying in 1924 and having been incapacitated from 1922 on, and the worst of what he did was explained away as "expedients required during the Russian Civil War" (which lasted roughly 1918-1922), so people give him a pass, despite the overwhelming evidence that he was willing to use exactly the same political weapons that Stalin was.

Your argument about the Orthodox Church (a cynical propaganda maneuver) would make sense if taken in isolation, but you then cite his paranoia and need for total control of society as the fundamental cause of his schemes of industrialization, collectivization and militarization. You can't have it both ways in your argument: either he was so obsessed with control that he destroyed everything he didn't control absolutely and completely (which would have included the Church), or he was superstitious (which is borne out by many eyewitnesses). I never said he was a "true believer" or a man of faith. I merely said he retained a visceral, superstitious fear of God following the Nazi invasion. It was enough that he went from an anti-religious campaign designed to destroy all religious expression to allowing it to exist. Of course he put NKVD agents into the Church to infiltrate it, but by Stalin's standards that was the bare minimum.

Stalin's authorship of his poetry is not in doubt. It was written to impress girls and sent to them when he was still a young man. He actually avoided discussing it later in life because it detracted from the view of him as a powerful leader.

And as for your question, no, the socialist ideologues of his generation were decidedly NOT anti-military. They opposed "imperialist wars" but they were actively arming the "working class" for open class warfare. This is evident not only from the Bolshevik coup, but also from the experience of many other countries at the time (most notably, Germany, where proto-Nazis got their start fighting armed Spartacists in the streets).

It's also a misconception that Stalin executed competent generals. When you look at the ones executed and the ones who remain, it becomes clear he executed the incompetent ones. Dybenko, for example, fled the field of battle in the Russian Civil War and his only exploits were against unarmed peasants. Many others were opponents of the use of the tank and favored continued reliance on cavalry. The "Stalin executed all the good generals and senior officers" myth was one that the Soviets spread in the 1950s and 1960s to deflect attention from the fact that Stalin (and his successors) were planning to take over the world.

I have no idea what you're talking about on the 76.2mm gun, since Russia was using 76.2mm guns in World War I as well. Can you cite a source?

As for the uselessness of the captured Soviet tanks, I would also like to see a source. The sheer numbers of tanks seized, combined with their mention in the memoirs of Guderian and others, makes me skeptical of the claim.

In any event, this isn't designed to be a debate over whether or not the Soviet Union could have won the war without Allied help after the Nazi attack, or whether or not the casualty rate was sustainable (prior to the Kursk counteroffensive in 1943, it wasn't, and everyone agrees on that point). The question is whether or not the Red Army had the equipment and resources to start a war against Germany. The answer to that question is that it did. Yes, it would have suffered heavier casualties than an army with more advanced equipment or better training, but had the Soviet air force gotten into the air, it had the numbers and gunnery to overwhelm the Luftwaffe, just like the Soviet tanks could hold their own against the German tanks (Hell, the Germans still used PzKpfw Mark Is in Barbarossa, and those things were shit).

The entire reason that I discussed Stalin's military buildup was not to allow you to start a pissing match over the minutiae of World War II, which I understand is a hobby for a wide range of people from ex-military types to 300-pound retired mechanical engineers, inclusively. The point was to show that Stalin never at any point swore off the notion of worldwide revolution that the "ideologues" Lenin and Trotsky had worked to achieve. The risks that Stalin took nearly caused revolution in 1932-1933 and again in 1936. In 1941, as we all know, he expected to be arrested and shot in late June.

I stand by my assertion that Stalin was not qualitatively different from Lenin or Trotsky. Neither of them wanted revolution if they weren't leading it. If Lenin were committed to revolution rather than power, he wouldn't have gotten rid of the legitimately elected parliament that was mostly composed of Social Revolutionaries with a strong Bolshevik presence. He wouldn't have murdered Mensheviks and left-leaning Social Revolutionaries who shared his goals.

Trotsky, similarly, saw Stalin implementing many of his own ideas, but because it was Stalin, and not Trotsky, doing the implementing, he railed against Stalin mercilessly (and without anyone listening).

Your original statement was that people see Lenin and Trotsky as "ideologues" and Stalin as "just a thug". My point is that, regardless of anything else, Stalin was not fundamentally different from Lenin or Trotsky. Lenin wrote more, yes, because he was in power for less time. So perhaps he's a bit of the Saul Alinsky to Stalin's Obama. However, in a qualitative sense, they're essentially the same. The same ambition, thirst for power, willingness to use any means to obtain and maintain it, indifference to human suffering, willingness to "sacrifice" the Russian people for a chimera of world revolution and writings that are practically unreadable. There's not one point where they differ, except that Stalin threw better dinner parties and was 100% paranoid, whereas the others were only perhaps 75% paranoid.