"Soviet-era dictators" still had to run everything by the Supreme Soviet, far more to any degree than any Pope. It is ironically only during the Yeltsin era that the term dictator can be much more easily applied to the Russian system, to horrendous results because nothing ever got done other than large sell-offs of public property and stuff only started functioning again once Putin was able to achieve an actual legislative consensus in the legislature (even if it was from a base of oligarchs).

Stalin was notorious for having far too much stuff go past his desk, but to claim that he was a micro manager on the level of like, Tsar Nicholas is not understanding how Soviet politics actually worked. When it worked well, it was because it was a consensus based process with a firm theoretical grounding based in the founding ideology of Marxist-Leninism. Thing went downhill once the intellectual elites not only disputed the consensus (by fully rejecting Stalin's thought and legacy despite it's general popularity among contemporary Russians) but also, in doing so, completely lost theoretical grounding, deviating into disastrous attempts at left-communism, and then swerving back disastrously into attempts at social democracy.