Berianist coup, Allies called for help on the Eastern front

basileus

That's a recurring idea of mine. WI at the end of June 1941 Beria stages a successful coup against Stalin (maybe disguising it as a sudden "natural" death of the Vozhd) and begins not only to free a sizable part of the detainees in the Gulag, but most of all publicly asks for Western direct help against the Nazis? Could a Western expedition corps (British, for the moment being) be actually sent to the Eastern meatgrinder? And if yes, with what size, and what likely combat results?
 

Codeman

i doubt the red army would last long enough for them to get their and if they did the germans would destroy them too
 

Jason

Unlikely we could spare anything-we did have one or two squadrons of hurricanes in USSR in 41/42 (officially there to train the Russians how to fly the aircraft we were sending them but most of the time in the front line).

Perhaps instead of the Poles in Russian prison camps leaving to join Free Pole forces at British territory in the Middle East, the coup might have been offered the chance to have the Free Poles form on Russian soil (I know some did as communist free poles but I'm talking about the 60,000+ previously in Russian camps who joined the official free poles in British service)
 

aktarian

basileus said:
That's a recurring idea of mine. WI at the end of June 1941 Beria stages a successful coup against Stalin (maybe disguising it as a sudden "natural" death of the Vozhd) and begins not only to free a sizable part of the detainees in the Gulag, but most of all publicly asks for Western direct help against the Nazis? Could a Western expedition corps (British, for the moment being) be actually sent to the Eastern meatgrinder? And if yes, with what size, and what likely combat results?
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I think Beria is far too paranoid to do this. Something like Brest-Litovsk peace is offered. The question is whether Germans will accept it.
 

Nosb

aktarian said:
I think Beria is far too paranoid to do this. Something like Brest-Litovsk peace is offered. The question is whether Germans will accept it.
Click to expand...

No, not with Hitler in charge. He wanted everything west of the Urals. Incidentally the Nazis predicated that Stalin would be toppled by a internal uprising. That's one of the reasons they thought that Barbarossa could have reached the Volga-Archange line.
 

Melvin Loh

Would the western allies trust a piece of scum as loathsome as Beria ? How would old Lavrenty have handled military competents like Zhukov anyways, would he have been more militarily flexible than Stalin ?

Jason, I thought by 1941-42 there was much more Lend Lease equipment flowing to Murmansk from the US and UK ? What about the 200 or so Hurricanes that were sent in crates to Russia which initially were bound for Singapore (and apparently many of which were never even unpacked and assembled) but were diverted to Stalin in Churchill's attempt to butter him up ?
 

Derek Jackson

Assume a non Stalinist leadership in the Soviet Union was sending Western soldiers what you would want to offer in you were the West or ask for if you were say Zhukov?

I suspect that 10 divisions landing in, say, the South of France or Norway would make as big a difference as an equivalant force somehow got to the Eastern front.
 
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