Timur was also a better person then Stalin, had a better relationship with his family and wasn't paranoid. Maybe Ivan IV was as much as a jerkass.
I would compare Stalin ratherly ot Ivan IV than to Timur. Medieval rulers rarely were nice people but Ivan IV didn't get his nickname without reason. He was pretty ruthless man who threatened even his relatives terrible way. Damn it, he even crushed his heir's skull because them had some argue about tsarevich's wife.
Ivan and Stalin were similar this way: both started out as innovative leaders, only to give in to their paranoid urges and commit what amounts to societal self-harm.
When the two men died (both TTL and OTL), they left behind a mess that other leaders tried to clean up:
Ivan's actions posthumously destroyed his own dynasty and lead to the Time of Troubles, while Stalin's actions shredded many of the goals of the Communist Revolution and contributed to the Union's fall less than 40 years after his own death.
I disagree that Stalin was a bigger monster or even an equal monster to Hitler. AFAIK the latest estimates have something like 5-8 million extraneous deaths under Stalin. Obviously that's nothing to minimize, and Stalin was a grade-A son of a bitch, but that's over twenty years and much of it the result of gross incompetence. The Nazis managed to outstrip those numbers within four years and fully intended to murder tens of millions more if they hadn't been stopped. You just need to look at Eastern Europe to decide whether Soviet Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler was worse. After decades of Soviet domination, Poles, Czechs, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, etc. still exist, and not as dwindling, wretched slave races. You would not be able to say the same if the Nazis had won.
The way I see it, Hitler's actions were far, far worse: as they entailed not merely the acquisition of territory, but the destruction of entire races.
I think Stalin was worse on a personal level. The man stabbed EVERYBODY and ANYBODY in the back. He murdered and killed his followers, he murdered and killed other foreign communists, he sent his own daughter's boyfriend to a Gulag, he gave someone like Lavrentiy Beria a job as a secret policeman, and he brutalized his own fellow Georgians in a way that even Lenin was appalled by. The people who fought to keep Leningrad alive were also purged out of personal jealousy.
On a foreign level, he was just as horrible: more concerned with power than solidarity, he frequently shortchanged his "fellow" revolutionaries in China and Spain. He violated a non-aggression Pact and backstabbed the Poles. And yet, he happily made deals with the very Fascist enemy he claimed to despise.