Could Stalin take over Western Europe after WW2?

[Magnum]

If we run with my PoDs... the Soviets could avoid the crippling damage to their breadbasket and would have the agricultural resources to supplement local production enough to feed continental Europe. They had kinda already done once it before. German occupied Europe would have been crippled by famine in the winter of '41/'42 had Stalin not opened Soviet granaries to the Germans and supplied their tractors with so much oil... not because he was a nice guy (even typing out that fragment made me laughs) but because he was trying to buy off Hitler from invading him. Obviously didn't take. But it does show that a Soviet dominated Europe would have the resources to feed itself... at least for the short-medium term.

A 1942 or later PoD, on the other hand, tosses that out the window. The Soviets would be hard pressed to feed all of Europe after the devastation of the OTL Barbarossa. Even as it was, their efforts to feed Eastern Europe in the winter of '45/'46 contributed to a major famine in Soviet Central Asia.

How about this:
- FDR dies prior to 1940, the New Deal coalition fractures (ala '48) and an isolationist Republican (Wilkie?) becomes president. He never decides to fund any fancy Manhattan project.
- Japan and China are not at war, meaning no need for Japan to go ful Pearl Harbor. Either because something happened in '36 that kept the militarists in check, or because Tokyo's efforts for peace in '38 won out over the militarists, or because the Soviet Union attack Japan in that time span, forcing it to the negotiating table, or something. Whatever it is, the Japanese are left in no position to awaken the sleeping giant.
- Soviets prepare for an attack on Germany and actually do so after Dunkirk. French fight on, causing more losses from attrition to the Panzers, before finally being driven out.
- lack of trade with the Soviets crashes the Nazi economy and war effort
- Germans counterattack, but the Red Army handles the situation comparatively better (maybe that short war with Japan led to them fixing some of their flaws), "only" losing ~1 million men to encirclement, and are in Berlin by early-mid '43
- British and French return to the continent, but Stalin will have none of it, and advances all the way to Gibraltar

They can't take out Britain, but Britain can't take them out either.

 

[AYC]

@Ephraim Ben Raphael 's The Falcon Cannot Hear has the Soviets getting all of Germany and East France due to the US not entering World War II because of the Second American Civil War.

 

[Cregan]

Stalin has a heart attack/falls down the stairs/brain aneurysm in 1937 before he can kick off the Great Purge, but after his Old Bolshevik rivals Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov have already been discredited and demoted from power (and too late to prevent the Holodomor, collectivization, Socialism in One Country, 5 year plan industrialization, Russification, etc).

Kirov survives and takes power, establishing a 'Stalinist-lite' government. He mitigates the excesses of the Holodomor but continues industrialization. No mass purges and consequent crippling of the Red Army, instead he continues reforming and upgrading the Soviet military. Deep Battle is adopted much earlier.

Kirov signs an economic trade deal with Hitler to buy time and get tech to finish upgrading the Red Army, but there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to carve up Eastern Europe. The Soviets do claim a buffer zone when the Nazis conquer Poland and the Baltic states, but that's it (no Winter War). Kirov sits back and watches Nazi Germany drive the WAllies from continental Europe (Fall of France, etc), but is extremely wary of Hitler. When the Nazis launch Operation Barbarossa it crashes into massive and prepared Soviet defenses, with the Axis never penetrating into the Soviet heartland so they cannot loot Soviet resources. The Red Army then throws the Axis forces back, with sheer brutal momentum carrying them all the way to the Atlantic coast.

Plausible?

 

[jamesownz]

Stalin? I don't think so

You can't have U.S troops on the continent.. with the A-Bomb the Soviets would get destroyed.

So you would have to have the U.S not be in the war and without them well the Germans are just that much stronger it is hard to see how they lose.. or if they do it wouldn't be for years.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Stalin has a heart attack/falls down the stairs/brain aneurysm in 1937 before he can kick off the Great Purge, but after his Old Bolshevik rivals Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov have already been discredited and demoted from power (and too late to prevent the Holodomor, collectivization, Socialism in One Country, 5 year plan industrialization, Russification, etc).

Kirov survives and takes power, establishing a 'Stalinist-lite' government. He mitigates the excesses of the Holodomor but continues industrialization. No mass purges and consequent crippling of the Red Army, instead he continues reforming and upgrading the Soviet military. Deep Battle is adopted much earlier.

Kirov signs an economic trade deal with Hitler to buy time and get tech to finish upgrading the Red Army, but there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to carve up Eastern Europe. The Soviets do claim a buffer zone when the Nazis conquer Poland and the Baltic states, but that's it (no Winter War). Kirov sits back and watches Nazi Germany drive the WAllies from continental Europe (Fall of France, etc), but is extremely wary of Hitler. When the Nazis launch Operation Barbarossa it crashes into massive and prepared Soviet defenses, with the Axis never penetrating into the Soviet heartland so they cannot loot Soviet resources. The Red Army then throws the Axis forces back, with sheer brutal momentum carrying them all the way to the Atlantic coast.

Plausible?

As I recall, Kirov was murdered in 1934. Molotov or Zhdanov possibly. Malenkov probably seen as too young and untried in 1937. On the down side, situation could have been more unstable if Stalin had died in 1937, Trotsky is still alive and in exile (until 1941) and I don't think Bukharin was finally purged until 1938.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Quotes didn't work properly for some reason!

 

[Johannes Parisiensis]

And how would the fact Soviet troops would be further West than OTL affect the situation of the KMT in China, the Korean partition and would the earlier Germany defeat influe on the funding of Project Manhattan?