DBWI: Shitty, Unhappy, USSR

Shitty, Unhappy, USSR
How do you get the USSR to be a totalitarian state instead of a stable democracy ?
 

Nietzsche

Banned
Well, I think that if Stalin hadn't been shot, and he managed to deport Trotsky, our glorious Soviet Union would've simply had been under his paranoid thumb.
 

WyldCard4

Banned
Simply have no Wegsky (am I spelling this right?) and the USSR loses one of its great founding fathers who influence the democratic process and political thought.

The USSR was pretty unstable at first.
 
Well unstable as the USSR was, at least (for the formative period) the neighbouring countries were either friendly socialist states (Germany, Hungary) or stable, non-menacing democracies (Czecho-Slovakia, Sweden). The fledgling democratic traditions had the time and space to develop in the 30s and 40s. I have always thought that the outcome of the Great War and the following Revolutionary period was very beneficial and, actually, a quite lucky one for the USSR.

Maybe, if the USSR was threatened by aggressive, imperialist or racialist states early on, the development of the Workers State could have been perverted towards authoritarianism. A Second Great War (?) or a serious threat of such, against something like a league of European monarchies presumably could have had such an effect.
 

Nietzsche

Banned
Well unstable as the USSR was, at least (for the formative period) the neighbouring countries were either friendly socialist states (Germany, Hungary) or stable, non-menacing democracies (Czecho-Slovakia, Sweden). The fledgling democratic traditions had the time and space to develop in the 30s and 40s. I have always thought that the outcome of the Great War and the following Revolutionary period was very beneficial and, actually, a quite lucky one for the USSR.

Maybe, if the USSR was threatened by aggressive, imperialist or racialist states early on, the development of the Workers State could have been perverted towards authoritarianism. A Second Great War (?) or a serious threat of such, against something like a league of European monarchies presumably could have had such an effect.
Well, even the monarchies eventually converted to Constitutional Monarchies with socialist majorities. I think the world has turned out quite well, save the few Soviet-Sino wars that occurred during Japan's occupation of China.
 
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