A Soviet Reconquista after a Nazi victory in WWII?

So in a lot of timelines featuring a Nazi victory, the Soviet Union is pushed behind the Ural Mountains, this Soviet rump state is usually allied with the United States.

So is it possible for the rump Soviet Union to retake european Russia? How might this happen?

What difficulties might the rump Soviet Union face if european Russia has been under Nazi rule for a prolonged period of time?
 
Soviets can do it easily as the Nazis implode then are crushed by the USA.

Main challenge is that the territory is gutted. The USA will look the other way as they slit the throats of the German settlers the Nazis planned to move into the area, but rebuilding the agriculture and population will take a long time.
 
So in a lot of timelines featuring a Nazi victory, the Soviet Union is pushed behind the Ural Mountains, this Soviet rump state is usually allied with the United States.

I always found the assumption that the USSR could survive its guts ripped out to be silly. The absolute beating it took IOTL would be nothing compared to a state that's been thrown over the Urals.

So is it possible for the rump Soviet Union to retake european Russia? How might this happen?

The Nazi Empire collapses under its weight, and the subsequent German state withdraws its military from most of what was once Eastern Slavdom, most likely followed by the relatively few colonists they managed to convince to go east of the river Bug. Maybe Dnieper. Then the "Soviet" armies roll in.

What difficulties might the rump Soviet Union face if european Russia has been under Nazi rule for a prolonged period of time?

Mostly fallow land.

EDIT: Also a ton of empty land that's been re-claimed by nature.
 
Main challenge is that the territory is gutted. The USA will look the other way as they slit the throats of the German settlers the Nazis planned to move into the area, but rebuilding the agriculture and population will take a long time.

Really depends on when it happens. If the Reich collapses within a decade of the war with the Soviets concluding - say, Germany gets a quick and decisive victory against the USSR in 1941, but Hitler still gets into a war with the United States which ends with several major German cities getting nuked - then the rump USSR will fairly easily reabsorb its European territories only a few years after losing them.

But if the Reich collapses, or at least retracts, decades after the end of the war, then at least the Baltic, Belarus, and the Ukraine (with Crimea) will be probably be thoroughly Germanized, both by settlement and assimilation. Reabsorbing this territory will be much more difficult for the Soviets - not least because a USSR that has spent decades shorn of its European territories, or even “merely” having lost an amount of territory similar to that stipulated by Brest-Litovsk, will be a fairly weak state. Plus, regaining the Caucasus is probably a non-starter in this scenario anyway, as the Armenians, Azeris, and all the rest are not going to happily trade one occupier for the other, and then US will likely be happily supporting them as the Reich collapses.
 
But if the Reich collapses, or at least retracts, decades after the end of the war, then at least the Baltic, Belarus, and the Ukraine (with Crimea) will be probably be thoroughly Germanized, both by settlement and assimilation.

IIRC the Reich's own estimates predicted great difficulties with Germanization of Eastern territories over the river Bug. IMO the best they could accomplish with an OTL USSR-like lifespan is a partial Germanisation of the Balctics and the regions west of the Dnieper. Having everything up to the B-L border Germanized seems rather optimistic with a pre-2000. timeframe.
 
IIRC the Reich's own estimates predicted great difficulties with Germanization of Eastern territories over the river Bug. IMO the best they could accomplish with an OTL USSR-like lifespan is a partial Germanisation of the Balctics and the regions west of the Dnieper. Having everything up to the B-L border Germanized seems rather optimistic with a pre-2000. timeframe.

That’s still a substantial chunk of the USSR’s pre-Barbarossa territory, including around half of what is today Belarus and Ukraine. If the Reich collapses sometime around the year 2000, the more likely inheritor of that territory would be a German settler state or two (say, the Ostland and Ukraine Reichskommissariats reconstituted as independent apartheid states), as opposed to a greatly weakened USSR that will have great difficulty just reabsorbing the traditionally Russian lands west of the Urals.
 
That’s still a substantial chunk of the USSR’s pre-Barbarossa territory, including around half of what is today Belarus and Ukraine. If the Reich collapses sometime around the year 2000, the more likely inheritor of that territory would be a German settler state or two (say, the Ostland and Ukraine Reichskommissariats reconstituted as independent apartheid states), as opposed to a greatly weakened USSR that will have great difficulty just reabsorbing the traditionally Russian lands west of the Urals.

Agreed. Though depending on how few Slavs are left in the territory, it is just as likely that they won't be apartheid states but just Eastern Germany.
 

Anchises

Banned
To many variables here.

If the Germans have nukes and it is a Soviet-style collapse majority German settler areas are off-limits.

If Germany quickly collapses there won't be many settlers.
 
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