And I find it quite amusing that whenever you talk about Stalin, you sound like a hardcore Stalinist of the highest order.

Not at all. Stalin is the worst mass murderer in human history. Hitler is only in 3rd place, behind both Stalin and Mao, but because modern leftists have secret sympathies for communism, they elevate Hitler to #1 and downplay the greater evils of Stalin and Mao.

Stalin was very powerful. The most powerful leader in the history of Russia. He gained that power through mass murder and extreme fear.

To use your own terminology, you're only taking mobilized power rather than potential power.

Modern Russia lacks both. Potential power is GDP and technological base, which Russia lacks now compared to the West. WW2 Russia had parity there and was individually economically stronger than any other country in the world except the US. Now Russia is a glorified gas station with a relatively low GDP per capita. And in mobilized power, there is obviously no comparison to Stalin's Russia, which was more fully mobilized than any nation on earth has ever been.

I would almost believe that you are Russian, given the reverence Russians now have for Stalin...

Putin has certainly put a max effort into rehabilitating Stalin. Even in 2016 he wasn't particularly popular in Russia, yet his polling numbers keep improving. It's a sad state of affairs for a broken people willing to give up anything to a return to imagined glory.

So he is not a 'dictator' but just an oligarch

Putin is a dictator. Not all dictators have absolute power like Stalin did. We judge dictatorship as the power relationship versus the people, not versus their own ruling class of elites.

Sounds pretty dumb. But here you accept that if Russia counter-escalates enough, it will win, because it outclasses your corrupt puppet shithole non-country by orders of magnitude.

It is dumb, but no, you're wrong. Even if Russia went all-out, it would lose. It would lose because the people in Russia would revolt and it would collapse internally like Germany in WW1. Even if they did not happen, the weak Russian industrial base simply cannot do more than it already is, so throwing more people at Ukraine doesn't help much if you can't properly equip them. Finally, the West would simply sent Ukraine more weapons if Russia tried to escalate more.

Had Russia gone all-out from the start it probably would have won. It didn't though.