Different But Not Evil

What POD(s) would it take to prevent the Cold War, by causing the US generally to think of Communism as merely a different form of government, but not a threat. The difference would be thought of a similar to the difference between a republic and the British constitutional monarchy: "Not for us, but OK for them".

Rules:
1. POD(s) must be after 7 November 1917.
2. These basic concepts of Communism are inviolable: State ownership of business, and the theoretical equality of man.
3. Changes which are peripheral to the main ideas mentioned above, such as not trying to get rid of religion, are allowed.

Some PODs I think would have gone a long way towards accomplishing that:

1. Paying off the Czarist bonds as soon as feasible. (Some of you may remember I started a TL based on this one but never got off the ground with it.)
2. Not forcing farm collectivization, but instead promoting a voluntary kibbutz-like system.
3. Not trying to get rid of religion by force. I would suggest that promoting the sins most people consider "fun" would go a much longer way towards getting rid of religion. Sweden is a good OTL example.
4. No pact with Hitler?
5. No alliance with Arab states against Israel.
 

thorr97

Banned
Let's see...

Somehow manage to have the Soviet Union actually manage to function without the Holodomor. Somehow manage to avoid the brutality of its civil war. Somehow manage to avoid the inevitable susceptibility of any "dictatorship of the proletariat" style of government not winding up with an actual dictator running the show. Somehow manage to avoid "The Terror" of the 1930s - this, despite even Lenin advocating the use of such tactics against the populace even as the Soviet Union was forming. Somehow managing to have the revolutionaries who started the Soviet Union not actively seek to spread that revolution elsewhere in the world - this, going beyond the official "socialism in one country" PR that only moderately applied to military expansion and not political subversion. Somehow manage to avoid the Soviet Union's immediately going to war with its neighbors to regain the territory it had previously negotiated away. Somehow manage to avoid the Soviet Union attempting to conquer Finland. Somehow manage to avoid the Soviet Union conquering Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Somehow manage to avoid the Soviet Union sponsoring revolutionary movements and terrorist groups throughout the world. And somehow manage to have the Soviet Union not set up its system of forced labor death camps.

Aside from those minor points it'd be a piece of cake!
 
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Given the amount of pro-USSR propaganda the US itself produced during WW2 to extent that many politicians started "being taken in by their own speeches" as Sir Humphrey would say I think it would have been easy for them to avoid the Cold War via those two points:

1. No creating a de-facto colonial Empire in Eastern Europe. Finlandize OTL's Warsaw Pact states then withdraw. Also make the OTL "feint" about a reunited, demilitarized and neutral Germany genuine, meaning Germany also ends up Finlandized like Eastern Europe.

2. Hold back the North Korea from invading the South. No "Spreading the Revolution" via open naked force. Support "Progressive Elements" aka Communist Underground movements and Guerillas across the world with arms and training, but don't do any outright invasions, not even when done via clients.

This way chances are the US will keep it's post-WW2 disarmament rather than Korea shocking them out of it. With no holding the line in Europe necessary either, they might very well retreat into isolation. France and Britain have a big buffer between them and the USSR, too.
Unlike my previous poster I think, that all the evil things they did internally wouldn't really matter regarding their perception in the West. It's not like the West had access to much information anyway and many of those who's job was in theory to find out and report such things were USSR cheerleaders in practice. Think that's just me mouthing off right-wing platitudes? A The New York Times won the 1932 Pulitzer prize for his Holodomor denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty .
 
The Soviet Union from the beginning regarded itself as at war with the whole non-Communist world - as the leader of the worldwide revolutionary socialist movement, which would soon follow Russia and overthrow all capitalist, imperialist, and feudal regimes everywhere.

Within a few years, this became obviously wrong, and the USSR established peaceful relations with its neighbors. But it still claimed the leadership of world revolution, and sponsored revolution wherever they could do so safely.

As to what Soviet leaders could do internally to avoid being viewed as genuinely evil - that would require a radical change in their thinking. Communism, like Nazism, aimed at the perfection of humanity, a goal which in the Communist imagination justified violence and coercion up to and including mass murder. Everyone and everything had to be part of the great solution - thus, a totalitarian state.

The Soviet Communists could have settled for a merely improved society, which would not require such measures, but that was not what drove them. Indeed, they railed against "social democrats" and other moderate leftists as betrayers of the true socialist faith.
 

thorr97

Banned
Drizzt,

Yeah, Duranty was a real piece of work alright. The saw the deliberate mass-starvation with his own eyes and then went on to vehemently deny its happening and defend the Soviet Union as being a "worker's paradise."

To this day the New York Times still refuses to return the Pulitzer the guy won for his "truthful and accurate reporting" of the event.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
1. Paying off the Czarist bonds as soon as feasible. (Some of you may remember I started a TL based on this one but never got off the ground with it.)
2. Not forcing farm collectivization, but instead promoting a voluntary kibbutz-like system.
3. Not trying to get rid of religion by force. I would suggest that promoting the sins most people consider "fun" would go a much longer way towards getting rid of religion. Sweden is a good OTL example.
4. No pact with Hitler?
5. No alliance with Arab states against Israel.
Pretty much all the PoDs you listed are mostly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Tsarist debts were mostly forgotten about by the Second World War. Collectivization was bad for the Soviet Union’s image but ultimately did not cause the Cold War, and neither did the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Your timeline is messed up because you fail to realize that the Cold War was already in full swing before the Soviet Union began supported the Arabs. America wasn’t even allies with Israel until the LBJ presidency. #3 would disgust American conservatives far more than state atheism.

You want to prevent the Cold War while still having the USSR be a major power? Here are some PoDs. Don’t annex the Baltic states. Don’t impose communism on Poland and Hungary. Using soft power to support communist groups is fine, but installing a Stalinist dictatorship at the barrel of a gun is not. Don’t support the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Don’t do the Berlin Blockade. Don’t start the Korean War. Don’t get involved in Latin America or Africa at all.
 
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I mean, this is a little bit weird, but you could do what @Aelita did in Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline. America and the USSR follow very different forms of socialism for a while, but 'what works for them works for them but not necessarily for us' is the rule of the day for a while.
 
Pretty much all the PoDs you listed are mostly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Tsarist debts were mostly forgotten about by the Second World War. Collectivization was bad for the Soviet Union’s image but ultimately did not cause the Cold War, and neither did the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Your timeline is messed up because you fail to realize that the Cold War was already in full swing before the Soviet Union began supported the Arabs. America wasn’t even allies with Israel until the LBJ presidency. #3 would disgust American conservatives far more than state atheism.

You want to prevent the Cold War while still having the USSR be a major power? Here are some PoDs. Don’t annex the Baltic states. Don’t impose communism on Poland and Hungary. Using soft power to support communist groups is fine, but installing a Stalinist dictatorship at the barrel of a gun is not. Don’t support the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Don’t do the Berlin Blockade. Don’t start the Korean War. Don’t get involved in Latin America or Africa at all.

Yeah, I don't think the Revolutionary Era in the USSR had much to do with Cold War paranoia. The west didn't like the Bolsheviks, obviously(as seen by the Civil War), but things would probably have settled down after a while, with the Soviets just being viewed as economic incompetents damaging nothing but their own nation, and who would eventually come crawling to the capitalist world for aid and trade anyway.

Everything changed with the Iron Curtain. Without that, I'm not even sure if Soviet involvement in the third world would be viewed as that much of a menace. These days, the USA and some of its allies aren't thrilled about China's Belt And Road, but the president doesn't go on TV inveighing against it night and day, accusing anyone who isn't sufficiently anti-Chinese of helping pave the way for tyranny. (As Reagan did with the comparatively pipsqueak Sandinistas.)
 

trurle

Banned
What POD(s) would it take to prevent the Cold War, by causing the US generally to think of Communism as merely a different form of government, but not a threat. The difference would be thought of a similar to the difference between a republic and the British constitutional monarchy: "Not for us, but OK for them".

Rules:
1. POD(s) must be after 7 November 1917.
2. These basic concepts of Communism are inviolable: State ownership of business, and the theoretical equality of man.
3. Changes which are peripheral to the main ideas mentioned above, such as not trying to get rid of religion, are allowed.

Some PODs I think would have gone a long way towards accomplishing that:

1. Paying off the Czarist bonds as soon as feasible. (Some of you may remember I started a TL based on this one but never got off the ground with it.)
2. Not forcing farm collectivization, but instead promoting a voluntary kibbutz-like system.
3. Not trying to get rid of religion by force. I would suggest that promoting the sins most people consider "fun" would go a much longer way towards getting rid of religion. Sweden is a good OTL example.
4. No pact with Hitler?
5. No alliance with Arab states against Israel.
All of above is of peripheral importance for international acceptance of communism.
You need to rid of Communist International (Comintern) and to remove the official support for World Revolution as soon as possible instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International
 
Maybe we could 'bend' the world revolution thing?

"Yes, the Soviets believe in world revolution, but they believe in a social and economic revolution, not necessarily a violent one. They also believe that the entire world must be capitalist in according with Marxism. As such, they devote their energy to sending international aid around the world and working to bring prosperity to everyone. Once the world is ready for proletarian revolution, the Soviet Union plans to work closely diplomatically with the proletarians and governments of all nations to peacefully bring humanity into communism - once technology allows for it."
 
Maybe we could 'bend' the world revolution thing?

"Yes, the Soviets believe in world revolution, but they believe in a social and economic revolution, not necessarily a violent one.

Then you need to prevent the anarchist bombings of 1919, or nobody's going to believe that for a second.
 
In the U.S., one of the biggest elements of hate and fear of “Godless communism” came from the oppression of religion. Satisfy Marx’s policy on religion with church/state separation, and much of the fear won’t materialize.

There was, though, an earlier Red Scare just after WW1, largely in the business/government sector. It was related to the fear of a labor uprising. It went away with the roaring twenties, but when the public fear surfaced with the Cold War, religion was a major motivator.
 

thorr97

Banned
Mark,

I always viewed the whole "godless Communism" bit as being more of a rhetorical statement. But, times being different, it could well have had more weight to it for some. Back in the late 40s and into the 50s is when it became apparent that the Soviets had, in fact, been actively spreading their agents and their influence throughout the West. Today, it's fashionable in some circles to downplay the Soviet efforts. But from what we now know about them - thanks, among other things, due to that brief period after the Soviet Union fell and Yelstin forced open the Soviet Communist Party archives - the actual scale, scope, and determination of the Soviet subversion efforts was even more widespread than all but the most frenzied anti-Communist crusaders believed back then. The phrase "a Red under every bed" was originally conjured as mockery but thanks to those archives it's apparent that the Soviets didn't fail at that goal for lack of trying. Thus the fear of the Soviet Union's spying and subversion efforts was quite well founded.
 
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