DBWI: Soviet Union Holds Together

Adolph Hitler, in reference to the Soviet Union, once famously claimed that all one had to do was kick in the door and the whole rotten structure would come crashing down.

Some would say that this declaration was prophetic when, in the aftermath of Barbarossa, the Soviet Union disintegrated rather spectacularly. This was made all the worse when contact with the upper echelons of the Soviet government was inexplicably lost. (The Germans hadn't even reached Moscow when the collapse started.)

Most of it's territories that weren't already occupied by the Germans fractured into numerous warlord states. Damn near all of them lead by nutjobs who thought that they should inherit all that the soviets held at their peak. It didn't help any that they spent more time fighting each other than the Germans. (When they weren't rather stupidly trying to imitate Vlassov.)

It often times feels as though the only ones to come out of the disintegration intact were the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. (The ubiquitous 'Stans.)

This period of time was so chaotic that we still aren't certain what happened to Stalin and his Inner Circle.

I ask you this simple question . . . How would the course of WW2 have changed if the Soviet Union had managed to hold together? Is such a thing even possible in light of it's horrifying collapse?

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OOC: So yeah. The idea is that Hitler was right about the Soviet Union's ability to stand up to a concerted attack. The result? The USSR effectively collapses into a number of petty warlord states that make China's own warlordism of the era look absolutely tame by comparison.

What happens after that? *shrugs* Go nuts. The only real "requirement" is that the 'Stans of Central Asia came out of the collapse better than the rest of the former Soviet Union.

EDIT: Shit. Forgot. On the off chance it isn't painfully obvious . . . Ignoring whichever ones thought that they could be a "better" Vlasov . . . Most of the warlords thought that they were destined to be the next Stalin.
 
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Well, Nazi Germany probably wouldn't have survived all the way to late 1946, at which point it suffered a traumatic nuclear death.

Maybe only the Japanese would have been nuked.
 
Well, there's this guy who I met at a gun show, name was Viktor. He told me that things were really fucked up in the former USSR, and he moved to Kazakhstan. He told me how he helped the Kazakhs fight the Gulag rebels, all about the Yakutsk massacre, and about Zhukov's group, the only group to really fight the Nazis. Kept calling Zhukov "One brave motherfucker".
 
Considering how rapidly the Soviets collapsed, It'd be pretty hard to figure out a way to make them survive. Maybe the best bet would be Stalin not purging his officer corp, since that likely damaged the Soviet's war waging ability. But on the other hand, Stalin might have had a point when he did so, considering what the survivors did when placed in a real fight. Seriously, it's almost comical how the warlords just up and left their country to die.

I wonder how this would affect communism if they survived, since Mongolia and Yugoslavia were (and in Yugoslavia's case is) pretty much the only communist states that existed at the end of WW2.
 
Maybe it was Stalin's purges that precipitated the collapse? I can't imagine it being particularly popular with the Soviet military. It certainly didn't endear him to them.
 
Maybe it was Stalin's purges that precipitated the collapse? I can't imagine it being particularly popular with the Soviet military. It certainly didn't endear him to them.

That's a possibility, but there's also a chance that not purging could've made the situation much worse. People that could have actually opposed Stalin possibly could have made the situation much worse.

It also could have been the collectivization programs that Stalin cooked up too. A lot of the warlords' troops came from the displaced farmers and political prisoners that the program created.
 
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