DBWI: Trotsky murdered in 1940

Trotsky was shot by a man posing as a Russian emigrant in 1952, mere weeks before his great opponent Stalin himself died (supposedly of poison).

As we know, he spent the last decade of his life largely writing against the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union; let's not discuss again if he was just a sore loser or genuinely in disagreement, here's not the place for it.

So, what if he had, instead, been killed in 1940? A KGB agent, Ramón Mercader, nearly succeeded and it was sheer luck that Trotsky saw him coming. Say he succeeds and Trotsky dies the same year, long before he became seriously involved in Mexican politics. Long before his "Legacies of..." books.

What then? Would the Soviet Union survive past the 1970s or would it descend into civil war anyway? What about Mexico?
 

Sachyriel

Banned
Well see after Mexico and Cuba went Socialist the United States was cut off from the South Americans as they slowly fell like Dominoes. Trotsky's longer-lasting influence in our world made America more busy in their own backyard, so in one where Trotsky dies then the USA might be fighting proxy wars half way around the world rather than just next door. If the USA had more money to spend on the prestige projects they've started up again today, (Man on the Moon, Soviets did that so early it looks implausible I know I know) maybe they would have impressed the Europeans so much that NATO would still be around. I mean, I don't see the Soviet Union really surviving past the Sino-Indo-Soviet split, it would be kind odd that the Soviet Union has a few billion people under a large Eurasian Hegemony when both nations were expected to beat the USSR in terms of economics by the late 1980s. However if NATO didn't collapse, Canada wouldn't feel threatened as much as it would have, leading to perhaps a much slower integration with the United States.

[OOC: Trotsky influences Mexico to be Socialist, more socialism in Latin America might lead to Che, Castro and others winning their wars. If the USA has to fight all the communists in S. America they can't go to Vietnam or Korea, and will probably have to spend more money to keep their own Hemisphere in line. After all, they do not want Soviet Influence into America, as part of the Munroe Doctrine excluding European Imperialism. That way the Soviets get to the moon before breaking apart, giving the Europeans more shock-and-awe than the Americans, causing the break of NATO after the Soviet Union dissolves in the 1970s because they feel they don't need the NATO alliance when the USA is seen as a junior partner. In that supposed Eurasian hegemony, India, as its own Communist state has a disagreement with China as well as the USSR and all three of them split without a war just as the USSR and the PRC did. The USSR then had a nuclear-less break up of it's own, though it is still officially socialist it has capitalist interests with Europe.]
 
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