Challenge: USSR and America Friends (Post 1945)

Delta Force

Banned
With a PoD after 1945, make the USSR and United States friendly towards each other while maintaining the United States as a capitalist democracy and the USSR as at least a socialist democracy, if not communist. By friendly I mean moving beyond Detente to a strong working relationship, at least on the level of the United States and the PRC in modern times, if not outright allies. Bonus points if this occurs without a major conflict erupting between major powers of the world (such as the USSR attacking the PRC).
 
I'd consider these to be essential conditions for such a scenario

1. Killing Stalin off in the latter days of WW2, with leadership of the CPSU going to Beria. Somehow, you need enduring pragmatic political liberalization and a foreign policy that can't even be remotely construed as threatening to global capitalism.

2. Have Henry Wallace somehow manage to stay on the ticket in 44, and become president following FDR's death. Wallace then needs to successfully manage the transition to a peacetime economy. If he can keep organized labor happy, and not heavy-handedly crush strikes like Truman did, there is a decent chance that his party can keep control of the Congress in 46.

3. Wallace needs to be a transformative figure in the Democratic Party. That means winning re-election in 48, and defining the national foreign policy agenda for the decade to come. He has to sell peaceful friendship and coexistence with the Soviet Union to the liberal managerial elite in government, and to somehow defang the business community that itched for independence and pathologically feared socialism in the era of technocratic corporatism.
 
One of the big things on the Spviet side I think is it's Industrial transition away from primarily producing weapons and watr materials to civil industry, this would not only make the USSR seem less of a threat* but also allow the Soviet and Eastern Bloc economies to grow, thus allowing further internal stability, which would make them less likely to look outwardly as a way of rallying people during times of dissent.



*A country with an industrial base almost as large as the U.S. geared towards war is by it's nature going to be viewed as a threat, regardless of what politial/economic system it uses.
 
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