Lenin's successor w/o Stalin

samcster94

Banned
Let's say Stalin gets shot before 1917 for doing something dumb and is dead. Who succeeds Lenin??? I am not expecting a socially liberal democratic society(like Finland developed once it got independence) nor am I expecting a 21st century China to pop up either, but I know Stalin's worst impulses can be avoided.
 
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Trotsky was too unpopular in party establishment and Beria was too young and low level party member. I bit doubt that he would be anything without Stalin. Perhaps Kamenev could be Lenin's successor.
 

Kaze

Banned
I would fear a government under Beria. There is a story in old Soviet Russia that young women would not cross through Meshchansky District without escort - un-escorted woman might be taken to the basement of the world's tallest building and given a choice of "sleep with Beria or Siberia".
 

samcster94

Banned
Trotsky was too unpopular in party establishment and Beria was too young and low level party member. I bit doubt that he would be anything without Stalin. Perhaps Kamenev could be Lenin's successor.
How would he have ruled???
 

samcster94

Banned
I would fear a government under Beria. There is a story in old Soviet Russia that young women would not cross through Meshchansky District without escort - un-escorted woman might be taken to the basement of the world's tallest building and given a choice of "sleep with Beria or Siberia".
Indeed, many of the alternatives were horrible too.
 
Trotsky is unlikely to become leader after Lenin due to the many reasons exhaustively raised on the forum every time this topic comes up. And there aren’t any other Left Oppositionists who could overshadow Trotsky to rise to Soviet leadership.

As for the alternatives..

Without Stalin a collective Soviet leadership seems likely, with Kamenev or Zinoviev as “first among equals”. However, despite their high rank and revolutionary credentials, they were both somewhat politically tainted for opposing the October Revolution, enough that I don’t think they have enough backing to become leader of the Soviet Union. (And there’s always latent anti-Semitism working against both of them).

For the Right Opposition the obvious candidate for Lenin’s successor is Bukharin, but he really wasn’t much of a politician so he could be outmanoeuvred by Zinoviev/Kamenev.

No Red Army commander would become Soviet leader due to deeply ingrained Party fears of “Bonapartism”, so Tuchaveksky is out of consideration barring an actual outright military coup (which is very unlikely considering how closely the Red Army was monitored and subordinate to the Party).

Maybe one of Stalin’s OTL goons takes the top spot after Lenin’s death - Molotov? Although I’ve always felt that “Iron Lazar” Kaganovich would be the most fascinating (though again very unlikely).
 
Zinoviev and Kamenev, despite the obvious handicap of their having opposed the October insurrection, still stand the best chance IMO. They may have had 1917 to live down, but Trotsky had decades of "anti-Leninism"--as well as the fear that he might be a "Bonaparte." Zinoviev and Kamenev had the two most powerful local party organizations (Leningrad and Moscow) behind them. And Kamenev was Acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life.
 
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Deleted member 1487

I would fear a government under Beria. There is a story in old Soviet Russia that young women would not cross through Meshchansky District without escort - un-escorted woman might be taken to the basement of the world's tallest building and given a choice of "sleep with Beria or Siberia".
Recent scholarship suggests that those stories were post-Stalin fabrication to justify purging Beria as Khurschev consolidated power. Beria was his biggest and most dangerous opponent in the post-Stalin struggle for power and apparently he was not exactly a doctrinaire communist (i.e. he wanted to legalize party leaders passing on their state assets to their kids and accept Marshall Plan aid for backing out of Central Europe), which did not endear him to the politburo. Plus by painting Beria as this well known monster that Stalin kept in power it also aided Khruschev's de-Stalinization plans.
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Team-Living-Dangerously-Politics/dp/0691145334
Above is the book if you want to see the argument made against Beria a notorious rapist-murderer.
 
. he wanted to legalize party leaders passing on their state assets to their kids and accept Marshall Plan aid for backing out of Central Europe
This sounds like it would result in an ussr thats even more of a corrupt fuckfest.
it would be delightfully interesting to read about, if written by someone knowledgeable.
 
Personal favorite

He's a favorite with a lot of people, but see E. H. Carr's not entirely fair condemnation of Stephen Cohen's favorable biography of Bukharin, where Carr rejects the idea of Bukharin as a serious alternative to Stalin and Stalinism:

"'For three or four crucial years when Stalin was building up his impregnable hold over the party and the state and beating down the opposition, Bukharin was his zealous henchman.' Bukharin was no fighter, he [Carr] insisted; and Stalin never treated him as a serious rival. Granted, Bukharin was tried and executed in 1938. 'It was no act of disloyalty to Stalin on the part of Bukharin, but a paranoiac streak of almost motiveless vindictiveness, which caused Stalin to sweep him into the blood-bath of the last great purge trial.' Delivering the final blow with a backhand, he suggested that this attachment to Bukharin was to be explained by the feeble impotence of the American left:

'A second and more agreeable factor may also have been at work in Mr Cohen's assessment of Bukharin — the desire, especially strong among American liberals, to believe that nice men make good political leaders. Cynical observation may throw doubt on this conclusion. In our own century, Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt were superb political leaders, but not perhaps very nice men. George McGovern and Edmund Muskie are exceedingly nice people, imbued with humane ideals and unimpeachable principles. But if a biography of one or other of them fifty years hence seeks to depict his hero as a lost political leader, frustrated only by the develish machinations of the wicked Richard Nixon, he will be seriously distorting history. And this is what has happened to Mr Cohen over Bukharin...'"

https://books.google.com/books?id=bBpLFKl6X_0C&pg=PA276

Cohen replied that he had made no such claim "His thesis did not depend upon alleged political skills, but on the ideas that Bukharin had developed from Lenin's last articles: a strategy for the attainment of socialism which amounted to a 'viable programmatic alternative in the 1920s." https://www.google.com/search?biw=1......0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.N65FC9R7WDo

Whatever one thinks of the dispute between Carr and Cohen, neither of them seems to have a very high opinion of Bukharin's "political skills."
 
I know Mikhail Frunze was a popular, often overlooked, and non-controversial figure (as far as Bolshevik politics and possible Lenin successors go), but from my limited knowledge of him, he was fairly uninterested in politics and was a Zinoviev supporter, and may have faced the same 'Bonapartist' stigma that Tukachevsky would've had to deal with. Maybe if Zinoviev is Head of Government, Frunze could be appointed Head of State?
 
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