How different would history be without Stalin?

How do you think the Second world war, Germany Occupation, Cold War period, Development of Ballistic Missiles and Space Race, technology today, would be if:
1. Vladimir Lenin never succeeded in the Russian Revolution, and the monarchy remained in power; or
2. A democratic revolution occurred, with success, overthrowing the monarchy and establishing a democratic republic; or
3. Vladimir Lenin succeeded in the Russian Revolution, establishing the USSR, but Leon Trotsky succeeded Lenin.
 
I hate to say it but under the first two options there would have been no forced industrialization; and the democratic republic would have been replaced in short order by a military dictatorship of White Guard style generals clueless about the modern world. Hence, under both options, no possibility of defeating Hitler's armies. Under the third, Trotsky option, the Soviet Union might have partly industrialized, but not enough, and I can't see Trotsky ever being able to really run the country effectively; he was basically a small-time sectarian wrapped up in doctrine disputes and utopian fantasies. A fourth option, some kind of party bureaucrat with Stalin-style skills, but without Stalin's paranoia and extreme bruality, might be the best option under the circumstances.

But with the three options presented, Hitler wins in the East and so the U.S. has to use nuclear weapons--lots of them--to defeat Hitler, say, in 1946.
 
As usual, someone is pantingly eager to see Hitler win. :rolleyes:

In the first case, Russia was industrializing pretty darn fast under the Czars: without the mess of the revolutionary period and continued foreign investment, etc., Russia would probably have a substantially bigger economy in the late 30s than it did in our world. It might not have been as heavily armed (Stalin's Russia was grotesquely top-heavy in terms of how much of the economy was geared for military ends), but that would be quite compensated for by the fact that France would be happy to remain allied (as pre-war) with Czarist Russia to keep Germany from Rising Again. Also, with a failed Red revolution, there would be much less fear of military ventures automatically leading to revolution. Therefore, in this case Germany probably gets squashed well _before_ Hitler gets it properly remilitarized, especially if the Czars hold onto Poland.

(If, without the Commie menace, Hitler gets into power in the first place

In the second case, a lefty Russian republic is probably not as Doomed as you seem to think it was, and even so the French would, again, be happy to ally with White Russian generals (no more clueless than the aformentioned pre-1914 regime) against Germans. The worst possible outcome, I suppose, would be the Whites taking over a democratic Russia that had let Poland and the Baltic states go: they might be resentful enough about such losses to ally with Hitler to divvy up Poland if he takes it easy on the Slavic Untermensch talk.

(Of course, again if Hitler ever comes to power. Heck, you might just get a more conventional right-wing regime that divvies up Eastern Europe with Russia and a long-lasting German-Russian block united by anti-Communism, anti-democratic views, anti-Semitism, anti-British-ism, and eventually anti-Americanism)

Trotsky: it's not like Hitler knew anything about running countries, either. :D And I do remember something about him founding and commanding the Red Army, but perhaps that's been oversold. The main problem with Trotsky was that he was disliked by a great many of his fellow revolutionaries, so he's unlikely to get in in the first place: ironically, they thought Stalin was the less dangerous guy...

Bruce
 
As usual, someone is pantingly eager to see Hitler win. :rolleyes:

Huh? I wrote that lack of sufficient industrialization would mean that the Soviets wouldn't have the strength to stand up to the Nazi armies and the U.S. would thus have to use nuclear weapons--lots of them--to defeat Hitler. How is this being "pantingly eager" to see Hitler win?

As to a Czarist or conservative military regime being able to build up the country in time for WW II (a 20-year window), please tell me how they would do this if they were hit by the Great Depression (which would have been the case under any government except one insulated from world markets and outside investment).

As to Trotsky, while Stalin was building a patronage machine in the 1920s and extending his leverage over the government and party, Trotsky was writing books on literary criticism and the need to speed up the world revolution. He was utterly clueless.

Yes, Stalin was a monstrous Ivan the Terrible type, but he did give that speech in the early 1930s to the effect that either we become an industrial power in ten years or they'll crush us. And he got the industrialization done. Trotsky did not have this sense of urgency--he thought the workers of other countries were on the verge of rising up and all the communists had to do was to be bold and they'd win in Germany, Spain, China, and beyond those ridges new peaks will rise, etc.

Hitler probably would have come to power even without the Bolshevik threat. There still would have been the Versailles Treaty, the stab in the back myth, hatred of Jews, the Great Depression, leftwing protests, angry military vets, the volkish movement, etc. to propel him forward. And once in power, he would have aimed at lebensraum and racial purification in Russia and the Ukraine even without a Bolshevik regime there. Look at how he treated the Poles even though Poland was under a conservative quasi-authoritarian government in the years leading up to the blitzkrieg invasion.

The Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 and won the Civil War not because they were so smart and realistic but because the other side--both the democratic parties and the conservative military types (the White Guard officers)--were appalling incompetent and out of touch with reality. Look at Kerensky. And look at all those White Guard generals who kept retreating. MI6 sent Somerset Maugham to Russia with lots of money to try and stop the Bolshevik revolution--he couldn't find anyone competent to work with, although he DID arrive a bit late in the game. And the capitalists and upper middle class in Russia lacked the self-confidence to really take command of the political institutions. So assuming that the non-Bolsheviks got lucky and were able to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky, how would they over the next decade magically transform themselves into leaders who could recognize the threat from Germany and understand that they had to speed up industrialization artificially, not just let it occur naturally, and had to be ready to churn out the weapons. They wouldn't.
 
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Hitler probably would have come to power even without the Bolshevik threat. There still would have been the Versailles Treaty, the stab in the back myth, hatred of Jews, the Great Depression, leftwing protests, angry military vets, the volkish movement, etc. to propel him forward. And once in power, he would have aimed at lebensraum and racial purification in Russia and the Ukraine even without a Bolshevik regime there. Look at how he treated the Poles even though Poland was under a conservative quasi-authoritarian government in the years leading up to the blitzkrieg invasion.

That still does not mean anyone resembling OTL's Hitler would take power.

There might be a right-wing revanchist regime of some kind, but it might be monarchist or standard-conservative (Von Papen?).

The butterflies from no Bolshevik revolution could affect WWI in such a way that Hitler is killed or crippled--without Hitler, the Nazi Party could simply fizzle or stay a left-wing movement that the right-wing elements would oppose. Heck, Hitler only got into Nazism because the Weimar government sent him to infiltrate the party--if Hitler is assigned to something else, he never becomes a Nazi and both he and the party could fade into obscurity.

And pre-WWII, anti-Semitic ideology was considered a French problem, not a German one. This is not to deny there were German anti-Semites, but I think you're overestimating the potency of Jew-hate in Germany at the time.
 
that would be quite compensated for by the fact that France would be happy to remain allied (as pre-war) with Czarist Russia to keep Germany from Rising Again. Also, with a failed Red revolution, there would be much less fear of military ventures automatically leading to revolution. Therefore, in this case Germany probably gets squashed well _before_ Hitler gets it properly remilitarized, especially if the Czars hold onto Poland.

A continued Czarist regime or a democratic republic wouldn't be a pariah state and thus it would be easier for Western Europe to work with Russia to contain or even suppress dangerous elements in Germany.
 
So far great replays for the WWII :), but what about in the future, given that the USSR is weak and does not pose an threat to the West, no Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba, I would the development of ballistic missiles witch led to space exploration be?:confused:
 
So far great replays for the WWII :), but what about in the future, given that the USSR is weak and does not pose an threat to the West, no Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba, I would the development of ballistic missiles witch led to space exploration be?:confused:

The postwar situation requires knowing how the war went.

Thus far, there are a bunch of different scenarios:

1. Democratic, Czarist, or non-scary socialist Russia contains or crushes Germany along with the other WWI Allies.

2. Hitler rises to power anyway, crushing weak White Russia or non-Stalinist USSR and gets nuked.

3. Revanchist Germany and revanchist Russia (probably undemocratic-White or some kind of fascist) attempt to undo WWI settlement and form a "Eurasia" bloc.
 
Also, here's another reason Hitler is unlikely to come to power in TTL...

In OTL, Stalin forbade the German Communist Party from cooperating with the Social Democrats to stop the Nazis.

Trotsky or some other non-Stalinist leader might not be that shortsighted. In TTL, the KPD, SPD, and other non-Nazi parties might band together to keep Hitler out of power.
 
An aspect of Hitler's rise to power we're not considering is the divisions among his foes. Without Comintern dictating policy, why must we assume that the German left don't get their elbows out of their arses? Hitler's rise was contingent on many factors.

Opes, ninja'd.

I hate to say it but under the first two options there would have been no forced industrialization; and the democratic republic would have been replaced in short order by a military dictatorship of White Guard style generals clueless about the modern world.

The titular character of Bulgakov's The White Guard is an educated professional who can speak Ukrainian, which should tell us something. The Whites weren't by any stretch of the imagination nice people, but they were not clueless reactionaries. They weren't even sure about restoring the monarchy - opinion was divided - and made a point of not being for the unchanged old regime.

The Russian officer corps was not a pack of aristocratic inbreds: even the 55,000 Russian officers of 1914 had been less homogenous than people think (Denikin came from a rather poorer background than Lenin), and come the revolution a lot of them, especially in the junior ranks, were dead. The 300,000 Russians officers of 1917 were drawn from all sorts of places and by no means all of them were Whites.

The Whites were not of course all after the same thing, but its much truer to say that they represented a sort of prototypical Russian fascism than that they were merely The Russia That Was.
 
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An aspect of Hitler's rise to power we're not considering is the divisions among his foes. Without Comintern dictating policy, why must we assume that the German left don't get their elbows out of their arses? Hitler's rise was contingent on many factors.

Opes, ninja'd.

Thanks for the backup. If you of all people are backing me on this matter, the "Stalinism necessary to fight TEH NAZI" meme is definitely in trouble.
 
If you have a non-Bolshevik Russia in the post-war years there's no guarantee that the Great Depression will transpire in the same manner. Firstly, a vast market with large amounts of natural resources has not been closed off to the rest of the world. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, all the capital that had been invested in Russia prior to 1914 will not have gone down the drain and will still be generating money for foreign investors - furthermore the massive loans made by European subscribers and states to the Tsarist government wouldn't have been written off either.
 
I am not 100% certain that preventing the Leninist coup or even Karl Marx absoutely prevents Stalin rising to some powerful position
 
I am not 100% certain that preventing the Leninist coup or even Karl Marx absoutely prevents Stalin rising to some powerful position

I think that's taking the Great Man theory of history a bit far...he's a dynamic individual, but I hardly think he's predestined to the position of Dictator of Russia. :)

Bruce
 
i doubt that hitler would ever come to power without the spectre of the soviet union hanging over germany. i doubt he would come to power if stalin didnt either, since history would diverge just from that so much that having something so similar to our history happen just wouldnt be possible.
 
Huh? I wrote that lack of sufficient industrialization would mean that the Soviets wouldn't have the strength to stand up to the Nazi armies and the U.S. would thus have to use nuclear weapons--lots of them--to defeat Hitler. How is this being "pantingly eager" to see Hitler win?


I'm just sick and tired of the way if any post-WWI POD is proposed, someone jumps in with "hey, that means Hitler does better." :mad:

As to a Czarist or conservative military regime being able to build up the country in time for WW II (a 20-year window), please tell me how they would do this if they were hit by the Great Depression (which would have been the case under any government except one insulated from world markets and outside investment).


That assumes beforehand we get the WWII we had OTL, which is quite unlikely.

Re the depression, Japan managed quite considerable growth during the 30s, as did Fascit Italy: being backwards has its advantages. Also, why should they be hit any harder than Germany (OTL one of the worst hit European countries).

As to Trotsky, while Stalin was building a patronage machine in the 1920s and extending his leverage over the government and party, Trotsky was writing books on literary criticism and the need to speed up the world revolution. He was utterly clueless.


Re gaining control of the government, perhaps so: I said myself he was unlikely to come to power.

Yes, Stalin was a monstrous Ivan the Terrible type, but he did give that speech in the early 1930s to the effect that either we become an industrial power in ten years or they'll crush us. And he got the industrialization done.


In an incredibly wasteful, self-destructive manner. As I said before, why are you assuming that a White or left-democratic Russia would be -less- effective at industrialization than the one run by the inbred Romanovs, which was industrializing at a good clip before 1914?

Trotsky did not have this sense of urgency--he thought the workers of other countries were on the verge of rising up and all the communists had to do was to be bold and they'd win in Germany, Spain, China, and beyond those ridges new peaks will rise, etc.


He also was in favor of forced-draft industrialization, just as Stalin was: while positioning himself to destroy Trotsky, Stalin accused Trotsky of being too "radical." And Stalin also thought Germany was on the verge of going Red: he ordered the Communists in Germany to not cooperate with the Socialists because he thought that the Nazi regime would destroy itself and be replaced by a Communist regime.

Hitler probably would have come to power even without the Bolshevik threat. There still would have been the Versailles Treaty, the stab in the back myth, hatred of Jews, the Great Depression, leftwing protests, angry military vets, the volkish movement, etc. to propel him forward.


Oh, I'd agree there's definitely a chance. I am in fact a bit annoyed with the right-wing types who blame all the ills of the 20th century on 1917 and claim that it was a necesary condition for his rise to power.

And once in power, he would have aimed at lebensraum and racial purification in Russia and the Ukraine even without a Bolshevik regime there.


Well, yes. But what he wants to do is not what is going to happen.

Look at how he treated the Poles even though Poland was under a conservative quasi-authoritarian government in the years leading up to the blitzkrieg invasion..


Oh, I see: I wasn't clear enough. When I suggested a Russian-German right-wing alliance, I meant a Germany led by someone other than Hitler

(Snip stuff discussed by others)

So assuming that the non-Bolsheviks got lucky and were able to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky, how would they over the next decade magically transform themselves into leaders who could recognize the threat from Germany and understand that they had to speed up industrialization artificially, not just let it occur naturally, and had to be ready to churn out the weapons. They wouldn't.

No, they could rearm as the British and French did, with French aid and investment, [1] and crush Hitler as part of a broader alliance before he got as strong as he was in 1941. You seem unfamiliar with the butterfly effect: look into it a bit more.

There are scenarios in which Hitler might do better than OTL (the Hitler temporarily allies with White Russia and then turns on them, for instance). But I think they are outnumbered by the ones in which he either fails to come to power or does worse.

Bruce


[1] Stalin wasn't magically perceptive: he was just paranoid. He would have started militarizing in the early 30s if Germany elected St. Francis of Assisi in Hitler's place: he just accelerated this when Hitler started building up his forces.
 
The OP suffers from the perhaps faulty assumption that the Revolution could even be a success with no Stalin, and further seems to ignore Kerensky's regime once the Tsar was toppled.
 
The OP suffers from the perhaps faulty assumption that the Revolution could even be a success with no Stalin, and further seems to ignore Kerensky's regime once the Tsar was toppled.

Hm? Option two "2. A democratic revolution occurred, with success, overthrowing the monarchy and establishing a democratic republic;" could easily be taken as a Kernesky regime wins out scenario: remember, there were two revolutions in 1917.

Bruce
 
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Minor item about Kerensky - he lived in exile to a ripe old age, not dying till 1970. One wonders what it must have been like, being one of the last surviving movers and shakers of that period, living on for over half a century after fumbling the ball of history?

Bruce
 
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