AHC: Baltic Sea united into one, not-Norse empire

Have successful Communist revolutions in Sweden and Denmark, then have them both join the Warsaw Pact. If the Soviet Union + its satellites is considered a single empire, then you've got a Slavic-led Baltic empire in 1955 or so.
 
Some ideas:

More pagans unite in response to Charlemagne's wars with the Saxons. Something like a Federation of Pagan peoples uniting to stop the spread of Christianity into areas that were never part of the Roman Empire -- broadly speaking, OTL Scandinavia, North Germany, North Poland, the Baltic States and European Russia. Basically a strong alliance of Pagan Kings to fight the Christian Germans and Franks.

Second idea would be a more powerful, longer lasting Hanseatic League, that unites different peoples through a sort of early rationalist/internationalist focus on mercantilism over aristocratic or ethnic issues (sort of like an early example of bourgeois power).

Third idea would be to continue the relationship between the Norse (maybe with less outward focus on colonizing Iceland/Greenland?), the Rus, and the Byzantine Empire, to the point where Scandinavia becomes Orthodox rather than Catholic at the time of the Great Schism. Then, the Orthodox powers would want to give themselves a little breathing room, and so they conquer the areas around what's now North Poland, &c.
 
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