1941: The Collapse of the Soviet-Union.

The guy he quotes seems to be a hardcore nationalist, combining racism and Stalin nostalgia in the charming fashion of today's Russian youth.



Now the Montefiore quote I don't really like; he's estimating really high (up to 10 mln!), and bases his estimate on "many people of the 15 mln displaced probably did not survive". The only way for the former to follow from the latter is for mortality to approach something horrendous like Soviet POWs in German Camps. It had to be worse than your Arctic ww2-era GULAG by a noticeable margin.

Was there a famine? Yes there was. Did people die? Enormous amounts. Where did the displaced people go? Donetsk and Kharkov, probably. Most Ukrainian urban areas experienced high growth during those 4 years.

There was the 20s famine - all over Ukraine, Volga, Urals and Kazakhstan, as well as North Caucasus. People were killing their crippled children so that others could survive. There were cases of cannibalism, recorded by the nascent Soviet miltsia. With an equal amount of proof as the quote you provided I can say that this likely repeated during the 30s. That is horrible enough without the need to come up with mindboggling numbers.

I now Montefiore isn't the best source, but it's certainly better than a deviantart blog written by someone who is obviously biased. It sucks that I don't have Radzinsky's bio at hand. Granted, Montefiore is nicer to read (IMO anyway), but Radzinsky has more figures IIRC.

Can someone please quote a source that'll definitively proove this guy's either trolling or being a goof (which seems to be the consensus anyway).
 
Within 4 weeks of the start of operation Barbarossa, a military coup occures in Moscow and the Soviet-Union descends into disorder.
Within several months, resistance have completely collapsed, much of the former Soviet-Union have broken appart in a full-scale armed popular revolution. Caucase is in complete anarchy and central asia rapidly becomes a warzone, with Cossack-lead rebellion and Uzbekistan declaring independence(only ex-SSR that retain such level of organization).
I really don't understand where this Western mis-conception that Cossacks are something akin to an ethnic group comes from. I apologize if that's not necessarily what you may believe, but this wording makes me presume you believe such.

Now, this is the alternate history forum and all that - so perhaps my post here may be in the wrong spirit, but here goes.

Certain conditions need to be filled for this scenario as a whole to even be possible. One of the details I'll firstly touch upon (which in this case is a rather irrelevant one) are the Cossacks in this case. A great deal of Decossackization was done during the Soviet Union, particularly in Stalin's time. By the 1930's, the entire population of them was down to two million individuals. It is rather unreasonable to believe that Muslim Caucasians (of which there are a great number) would rally alongside what is a tiny and predominately Jewish or Christian minority.

Andrew Nagorski also correctly identifies the fact that most were simply far too loyal to Stalin to depose of him. In his book, The Tipping Point: The Battle of Moscow he points out that to most Russians during the time period, Stalin and the state were one and the same. His personality cult was always alive, contrary to popular western opinion, but admittedly it grew expansively after the Great Patriotic War. Stalin's purges removed most who were willing to conflict with Stalin in any manner, and most of his average staffers were just the type of Russians aforementioned. If anything, a 'softer' Stalin would be necessary to make this plausible, or at least a much less efficient intelligence-gathering system within the Soviet Union. Keep in mind, the NKVD was implacable and almost astoundingly efficient.

But that's just me rambling about a few details, otherwise it's all just conjectural.

On another note though, German military forces didn't operate in the Karelian Isthmus. Finland was always unwilling to advance south into the urban sprawl, actually one of the reasons the Siege of Leningrad lasted as long as it did. As well, if we follow the premise of either a less efficient Intelligence branch or a softer Stalin, the Winter War may never have happened or have ended up much worse then normal. The former provides an interesting premise for such a coup d'état though.
 
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