UnitedHealth CEO shot
What you’re failing to realize is that Stalin happens BECAUSE of the Tzars not in spite of them
Lenin and the Revolution occured due to the terrible mismanagement, brutal autocracy of the Romonov Dynasty since the early 18th century, along with centuries of systemic anti-semitism and conspiracy theories dating back to the early Middle Ages.
Trotsky? Sure, but no Stalin didnt play a huge, crucial role in the October Revolution despite his later NKVD propogandists, that was arguably moreso Zinoviev, Lenin and Trotsky and even Lenin saw and realized how dangerous, vile and meglomaniacal Stalin was going to be. He repeatedly advised the Politburo to disown or arrest him but by the early 20's, due to two major strokes and nearly dying due to a non-Bolshevik Marxist assassin named Fanny Kaplin shooting him, he was nothing more then a mere figure head and Stalin was already carefully selecting his handpicked henchmen who would go on to do his bidding for the next 30 years. The Soviet Union didn't necessarily have to endure a meglomaniacal tyrant 20x worse and more harsh than what Tsar Nicholas II ever could be. They didn't necessarily have to be viewed as some brutal, authoritian, imperialist (the irony, huh?) world power. Does Russia still have to be this ultra-nationalist, territorial expansionist power?
So, my answer to "Who created Who?" is kind of simple: So? Tsars created as many reformers as they did revolutionaries like Lenin, Stalin, or Trotsky and Zinoviev? Many of these 19th century/20th century reformists, or revolutionaries like the Decembrists of 1820's? Tsars also created people like Leo Tolstoy, a man who hated autocracy, repression, and secret police but wasnt someone who felt you had to create a temporary worse dictatorship to make Russia a better place?
If you want to say people like Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin were violent, despotic revolutionary thugs who despite their best efforts, really didnt know any better, Guido, I can go along with that, too. Thats why many late 19th/early 20th century European socialists, anarchists like August Bebel, Karl Leopernick, and Rosa Luxembourg saw many of their Russian contemporaries as less-educated, brutal, autocratic-prone simpletons who lived in some vast, backward, scarcely-industrialized backwater region where Marx himself argued that any future anarcho-communist regime or society was doomed to fail. You probably won't hear that on some BBC Three economics documentary but he did say it and most late 19th century socialists agreed with him.