That makes me wonder two things:
a, how much of this is fabrication (after all, he was a lowly criminal in his early days)
b, if it is not fabrication, could this be the source of all the clearly fabricated propaganda mythos that other communist leaders had built around them? See for example Caucescu and his degrees.
The problem with a figure like Stalin is that while alive, as well as after death, he was either worshipped or hated with a passion. An given the continuity of the system he set up for many years after his death, the situation has continued until our days. Was he an ignorant lowlife that managed to keep himself in power for almost three decades by sheer animal astuteness, or was he a statesman with a goal that he was decided to attain whatever the costs?
He had quite a difficult rapport with Soviet intellectuals and artists (being of humble origins, an an aspiring poet in his youth, he always retained a certain awe in front of gifted creators) and in many cases he allowed them licenses that would have led anybody else to the Lubyanka basements. As for his ministers, he chose them carefully, and employed them accordingly. The ones who were useful but dangerous, he used them for whatever he needed and then had them liquidated (he took too much time with Beria though, and probably Beria ended up poisoning his master in February 1953). The ones who were his personal friends (like Voroshilov or Budyonny) he gave largely ceremonial posts, ans as time went by, he relegated them more and more to being decorative figureheads. And lastly, there were the ones who were useful and politically inoffensive; these ones he kept by his side until his (or their) death, like Mikoyan or Kaganovich.
He himself liked, at the beginning of his "reign" to compare himself with Peter the Great, although by the second half of the 1930s, quite tellingly he began to prefer comparing himself with Ivan IV the Terrible (he even charged Eisenstein with filming an epic film about the character). He was, more than anything else, a ruthless autocrat who had decided that he knew better than anybody else what was best for the USSR, and was absolutely resolved to follow his vision to the end. Again, like ancient eastern autocrats, without any care about the costs that it may entail.
One thing that for example is a myth is his reputation as a heavy drinker. Field Marshal Vasilievsky, who ate supper quite often with him during the war, was surprised to learn that Stalin drank only water during those meals. And we have a corroborating testimony from an unlikely source: a German officer of the party that accompanied Ribbentrop to the signing of the non agression pact in August 1939 in Moscow, who was also surprised that the colourless drink that the
Vozhd was drinking so profusely while toasting with German dignataries was nothing but water. He was not abstemious like Hitler, but he despised people who had no self control. During the famous drinking parties held at his dacha that ended with his drunken ministers leaving totally wasted in the early morning, he encouraged the others to drink, but he was very careful to never get drunk himself. The main end of such parties was for Stalin to watch closely his "courtiers" for any drunken slip of them that could awake his suspicions.
Stalin also used propaganda and encouraged a personality cult for political reasons, but it's quite dubious that he ever believed it himself. He could be incredibly cynical and pragmatic when needed, and with such personality traits, it's difficult to picture him as swallowing up his own propaganda.
