Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian - he was Georgian.
But suppose, despite his ruthlessness - or even
because of his ruthlessness - he is outmanoeuvered by his fellow Bolsheviks and the guy who comes out on top after Lenin is Gustav Klinger - from another minority group, the Volga Germans. It's unlikely, but surely not ASB.
Klinger was the delegate for the Communist Party of the German Colonists in Russia at the first Comintern meeting of 1919 and Wikipedia's complete entry on him is as follows:
Gustav Klinger (1876 – 1937 ?) was a
Russian Bolshevik politician. Klinger joined the Party in 1917 in time for the
revolution and was leader of the
Volga German Soviet government 1918. He became business manager for the newly founded
Communist International in 1919, and was elected to the Comintern Executive Committee in 1920. Klinger held various governmental posts in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. He was eventually killed during the
Stalinist purges, probably in 1937.
If the leader of the USSR is a
German, how on earth would Hitler react to that? And how would the Polish government feel?
Would there still be a second world war -but with Germany and the USSR on the same side? Or would Hitler not be content with gobbling up Poland but still want Russia as
Lebensraum?
(I see Wikipedia describe him as a
Russian Bolshevik, but it sounds like a pretty German name to me)