I'm thinking June 22, 1941, when the Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa and Stalin at first ordered Soviet military units not to fight back, hoping upon hope that it was all a mistake and the action of rogue commanders. And then "strong man" Stalin had some kind of break down for at least a number of hours and withdrew to a house in the country like a whipped and sniveling 8-year-old boy.
Yes, it was a pretty ripe time for a coup and a pretty classic missed opportunity.
In fact, when members of the Politburo later approached him at his country house, Stalin at first thought he was going to be arrested (he should have been, and a whispering campaign about a sexual peccadillo to further discredit him). If you want me to give rough odds, I'd say about a two-thirds chance there would have been a coup.
And we just happen to be living in the one-third chance world in which one did not occur.
OK, so that's not history, that is soundly debunked mythology.
There was no Stalin breakdown. Stalin just didn't make any
public appearances for a while. Not surprising as suddenly he had rather alot of urgent work. We have both hard evidence (in the form of a paper trail) and credible witnesses that all tell us that Stalin was at the tiller. The story about him thinking he was about to be arrested when a delegation arrives at his dacha is not from a credible source. There was no chance of a coup at this time. There was no "lost opportunity" to oust Stalin.
Further, there's really no chance of a coup ousting the Bolsheviks after the military purges, and there probably wasn't a chance before then either. Unless of course you buy the idea that Tukachevsky really was plotting against Stalin after the utter shambles of the Holodomor. Which may be true, but equally, it may just be Stalin's paranoia. Certainly we can be sure that people were horrified at how bad the famine in Ukraine, South Russia and Kazakhstan was, and certainly we can be sure that the regime
thought that it was under threat after the disaster. But horror doesn't necessarily mean people were ready to try and overthrow the Politburo and the paranoia of Stalin (and indeed the whole Bolshevik regime) is not evidence that there was a real threat.
A) Famines are less severe a lot of people live and those that survive some of them make way into powerful leadership positions
B) have the purge of 1937-38 less severe , instead of a million skilled and experienced individual being killed or executed and 2-3 million in gulags have 100,000 are excecuted and some 300,000 in gulags that way Stalin establish his grip over the nation but still have competent personale survive . This would have a massive impact on the war , the industrial production in 1937-38 was disrupted because of the purge and that's why the purge was discontinued, so with the industrial production going along with medium scale disruption especially in the military industrial complex the Soviets would produce more tanks and guns at the start of the war and the war effort would be more co ordinates because of better personnel and less fear of being sent to as the Soviets would say " tribunale "
There is evidence to show that the timing of the purges was connected to the famine, so a less severe famine, or a better state response to the famine, could delay the purges. However, the evidence is not conclusive, so we can't be certain.
Also, I say "delay" the purges, because if you look at Stalin's actions, he's basically acting like a cult leader who reacts to circumstances outside of his control by purging his followers. This leads me to believe that even if Stalin gets super lucky, if he lives long enough and has absolute power, he will start a deadly purge eventually. But again, that's not a certain thing. I can make the argument that Stalin being kept from absolute power for longer and facing less crises will mean less deadly purging, but it's just an argument.
On the one hand, we waste less resources and hopefully fewer proxy wars which stunt the Third World. On the other hand, you don’t have the motivation of national pride and “proving” your system is better.
So, when do we humans first land on the Moon?
I doubt a less extreme USSR saves the world from the Cold War let alone proxy wars in the 3rd World.
1) Those proxy wars were very much against Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The reason the Soviets engaged in them was not out of its own desire, but because it was the only state willing to oppose the USA, which was allied to all of the colonial powers, so local "freedom fighters" were going to beg the Soviets for help. So even though it was against their ideology and not very much in their interest, for the cost of some obsolete weapons (which the USSR had plenty of, having substantial amounts of ageing WW2 weapons of their own make and German make) they could harness local nationalist groups and oblige the US to either acquiesce or spend its own resources to oppose or buy off those local nationalists. And connecting the US with colonialism was also an ideological win. To avoid the proxy wars, you really need the imperialist powers to recognize that their time is up and they can either be a vassal of the USSR or the USA. And that wasn't really something they wanted to do. Britain and France had been peer powers to the US until very recently and both were in many ways still superior to the USSR when the Cold War began.
2) While the largest portion of the responsibility for the Cold War can be laid at Stalin's feet due to a completely wrong-headed ideological interpretation of international diplomacy and for good measure, a complete failure to understand what kind of country the USA was (the USA was not an imperialist state, it was a revolutionary state, that is, the way it saw the world was more like the Soviets than the British, and it's not like Marxist-Leninist theory modelled the British well either). However, the US and the British also acted to steer the world towards Cold War. The British (as well as other less powerful actors, who I won't mention for the sake of brevity) wanted to keep the distant US engaged in Europe in order to counter-act the Soviets, who had rocketed to pre-eminence on the continent (and who were nearby, thus more able to dominate the continent). And the US itself was acting to spread its own revolutionary ideology across Europe (including to the Soviet Union). Now, the US weren't doing this because they were evil capitalists or chuckling revolutionary ideologues. They simply saw their own system as superior to the systems in Europe and the export of those systems a move that would weave together the war-torn continent and guarantee peace and prosperity. Unfortunately, since the US was the best at doing things the American way, that meant accepting the United States as the economic hegemon of Europe, which was a tough pill for the British and the French, let alone the Soviets who had sacrificed millions of lives in the course of the Russian civil war, the purges of the 30s and in WW2 to build a completely incompatible system.
One can imagine a situation where Stalin dies near the end of WW2 and somehow Beria manages to come out on top (at least for a few years) and pursues a highly liberal course in order to distance himself from all the crimes he committed under Stalin. So Eastern Europe is allowed to have real democracy so long as whoever wins the election supports a continued alliance with the USSR (so they all get to be like OTL Finland), the USSR is a member of all the post WW2 institutions, including the IMF and if there is an alt-Marshall Plan (there may not be with the Soviets being so cooperative, of course) the Soviets apply to it and allow the countries they are occupying to apply to it as well. If we assume that the US Congress is willing to trust this cooperative Soviet Union run by a man they know is responsible for unspeakable things under Stalin (which I see as preeeetty unlikely) then suddenly Beria needs to re-introduce capitalism to the USSR in order to allow the Americans access to the Soviet economy (needless to say, his political enemies will have a field day with this, and even if he's murdered the others who were important under Stalin, all of his subordinates will have cut their teeth as middle-managers for the great Stalin, so I wouldn't count on their loyalty). So the odds of the USSR getting alt-Marshall Aid are low and it's easy to see the débâcle turning the US and USSR against each-other.
But let's say that there is no Marshall Aid. Maybe the US does a few bilateral deals with Britain, lends money to the most desperately damaged parts of Western Europe, there's plenty of ways even a liberal Soviet Union can fall out with the US over how to occupy Germany. The Soviet economy is a wreck, so they have huge incentives to over-print German money, which hurts the economies of the areas the US, UK and France are occupying. But if the US does what they did in OTL, and advocate for a new West German currency, the Soviets will see this as not only an attack on their over-printing, but also an effort by the US to revive German power. Relations can easily collapse here.
But maybe the Soviets and the other occupiers can work out a mutually acceptable compromise. But what about China? Mao isn't going to stop for no-one and the Soviets, as much as they hate Mao, have to accept his legitimacy if he wins the revolution, and in any case, by the end of WW2, they'd fallen out with Chiang bad. So the odds are good that Mao still wins the civil war in China and that the USSR accepts Communist China as a brother revolutionaries. In OTL, this started the first Red Scare in the US. Even if relations in TTL are better with the Soviets, it could easily drive a wedge between the US and the Soviets that starts a Cold War.
Or what about Korea, where both sides were determined to re-unite their country and destroy the other side? Or the decaying colonial empires, which are still full of nationalists looking for a patron? Or what about Israel, the Arab states, Iran and the rich prize of the oil of the middle east?
I think it is possible to get a less severe Cold War, but I think it is nearly impossible to avoid a Cold War.
fasquardon