alternatehistory.com

I came up with this one a couple of years ago. It is what I call a "poison pill" timeline - one where a change doesn't change much to begin with, but snowballs later.

In our time line, the Tsar needed some cash and offered to sell Russian America to the United States for a small sum. The debate in Congress took years before the purchase was approved, and then a whole separate debate was needed to actually secure funding for the purchase. It was a close-run thing.

Now, if the bills failed to pass, nothing much would have happened. Gold would have been discovered in the Klondike, which would likely have had the Tsar extend the gulags to Russian America and reinforce it with troops and NKVD to defend Russian gold, and Novy Archangelsk would have become a sizeable city, but frankly, not a whole lot would have changed outside of Alaska and western Canada.

WW1, the October Revolution, the Depression, Nazi Germany... the Berlin Airlift, no significant differences from our timeline.

August 29, 1949. 0700 hours. The NKVD atomic bomb project detonates "First Lightning" and the USSR becomes a nuclear power.

Around now, things start going pear-shaped.

The Cold War hasn't really gotten started yet, but the House Un-American Activities Committee had been working since 1938. In 1949, HUAC was close to its peak of political power. But instead of blackballing actors and sniffing around social clubs, they'd have real, nukular-powered Rooskies sitting right on our doorstep.

A HUAC with a visible, immediate enemy would likely have been much more powerful and effective. Even without atomics, most of North America would have been within reach of Soviet Tu-4s (B-29 copies) flying from Russian America or even Siberia.

The first notable event of the Cold War was the Berlin Airlift, which began in 1948. A handful of Red Army soldiers in Russian America would have been irrelevant. But after First Lightning in 1949, the balance of power would have been dramatically different. During the early phases of the Cold War, all of the western USSR lay within range of Allied bombers operating from bases in Germany and France. While Europe was within range of Soviet bombers, the Soviets didn't have any practical way to strike at North America until they developed ballistic missiles.

With bases in Russian America, the Anglo-American/Soviet balance would have been somewhat in favor of the Soviets. While the Soviets could pick up any gas station map to find a place in North America, the Soviet maps might show cities tens of miles from their true locations... if they were shown at all. The Allies could strike at a handful of well-known locations, but most of the USSR was simply a blank page.

With this in mind, the Soviet clampdown in Eastern Europe would probably have been much tighter. In the 1950s, the Soviets put a lot of effort into Africa, most of which went nowhere. That might have changed. And the Middle East. And Southeast Asia. And South America. And consider Canada, sharing a long border with the USSR... where the USA balked the USSR's expansionism before, things would go the other way.

By 1967, a century after fumbling the Alaska Purchase, things could be very grim. I can come up with some "most likely" timelines until the late 1950s, and then the options start multiplying rapidly. I see the most likely general timeline as a Soviet-dominated world; the SSRs, the Soviet-dominated blocs, Soviet fellow travelers, a handful of nominally non-aligned or opposing states living on suffrance, and the USA.

But that USA of 1967 would be armed to the teeth, paranoid, isolationist, and it would look a lot like Russia during the Terror of the 1930s. Civil rights? What civil rights? Don't you know They are out to get us? And they're winning?!
Top