AHC: Peacefully Resolve the Issue of Berlin

Instead of having Berlin permanently divided until the Cold War ended, peacefully resolve control over it well before the 1980's.
 
The "Stalin note" of 1952 was probably intended solely as a tactical move, but there is some evidence that after Stalin's death in 1953, and before the uprising of June 17, not only Beria (who was later made the scapegoat) but Malenkov as well, were willing to accept a united neutral "bourgeois democratic" Germany in order to block West German remilitarization. See "Malenkov on the German Question, 2 June 1953" at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/malenkov-the-german-question-2-june-1953 Also see my post at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/Z-eAjLyqJZg/XRJrrtbDsUwJ where I note that according to Robert Conquest, *Power and Policy in the USSR: The Struggle for Stalin's Succession 1945-1960,* p. 26, "A conference held under Communist auspices in Warsaw in February 1955 had proposed simultaneous withdrawal of occupation armies from Germany and of Soviet troops from Poland, the unification of Germany and free elections under the plan put forward by Eden at the Berlin Conference in January 1954 (and then rejected by Molotov), and urged that Germany should not enter any military coalition and her frontiers be guaranteed by the European states and the United States (*Trybuna Ludu*, February 9, 1955). Malenkov fell at this time, and no further mention of this conference's decisions was ever made."
 
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Molotov in 1947 proposed that with a few amendments--like restricting the president's powers--the Weimar Constitution should be used as the constitution for a united Germany. Just how serious the Soviets were about unification in 1947 is debatable but at least some historians (like Carolyn Woods Eisenberg) think they were serious--*provided* they got reparations from current production. https://books.google.com/books?id=JlRZM_VKzrMC&pg=PA487 Marc Trachtenberg, who is very skeptical that the "Stalin Note" of 1952 was intended seriously, thinks there is a much more plausible case for 1947 as a lost opportunity: "Ulam refers specifically to the 1947 Moscow conference and the Stalin Note business in 1952. Of these two, I personally think the 1947 affair is more puzzling. There is a vast, mostly German language, literature on the 1952 episode, and there is a good deal of evidence bearing on this issue in U.S., British and French archives. Many of the documents to be found in those western sources are quite suggestive, but the piece of evidence that struck me as decisive came from a Soviet source. This new evidence was cited on p. 127 of John Gaddis's WE NOW KNOW: "Soviet diplomat Vladimir Semyonov," Gaddis writes, "recalled Stalin asking: was it certain the Americans would turn the note down? Only when assured that it was did the Soviet leader give his approval, but with the warning that there would be grave consequences for Semyonov if this did not prove to be the case." (Gaddis's source for this is an unpublished 1994 paper by Alexei Filitov.) This, I thought--and if I'm wrong, I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me why--was as close to a smoking gun as we ever get in historical work.

"There are other reasons for not taking the Stalin Note affair too seriously, but the 1947 business is another matter entirely. The puzzle here is that when you read the records of the Moscow conference, Soviet policy does not seem the least bit intransigent. But the Americans, and especially Secretary of State Marshall, had exactly the opposite impression..." http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/comment8.htm


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