honestly for some people they have to get a bit into communism before they’re able to see mao and stalin as anything. i know for me it took a couple years of study before i was willing to hear anything about them. hopefully they dont stagnate as socdems but maybe the solution is to start them off with more “sympathetic” figures like marx or lenin. hell, anarchist pamphlets could probably be useful in pushing them left enough to at least be open to these things