Joseph Stalin memes lean hard on the dictator's grim record, wrapping the Great Purge, gulag exiles and mass executions in flat, deadpan image macros1. The most recognizable format is 'Stalin Says', a black-and-white portrait with white block text where the punchline is usually Stalin cheerfully announcing a purge, a five-year plan or a labor camp assignment1.

A second strand of the meme is the 'Sexy Stalin' or 'Young Stalin' edit, which pulls from a moody portrait originally featured on the cover of Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography Der Junge Stalin2. Editors sharpen the eyes, color the lips and post it as if Stalin were a brooding heartthrob, playing the ironic gap between the image and the man's history for laughs2. Both strands share the same joke engine: match the visual of a 20th-century mass murderer3 with the tone of a Tumblr thirst post or a Facebook motivational poster.

The typical Stalin Says build is a black-and-white portrait with two lines of white Impact-style text. Top line sets up an innocuous premise, bottom line delivers a Stalin-flavored punchline about purges, gulags or executing dissenters. Common convention is to keep the caption in Stalin's voice, first-person, matter-of-fact, as if a labor-camp order were the same as a grocery run.