In my timeline, I have the Red Army taking power from an inept Trotsky, but as happens quite a bit, I find my knowledge of Soviet military severly lacking, so heres the question, how would a Red Army Junta have performed?
Well the Junta happens in the 40's in my TL so Im not sure.Wasn't it mostly filled with oppertunists from the Tsarist military who sided with the Reds for personal gain/sympathy for the workers?
That is exactly right. No Stalin in this TL.I assume in your timeline that there have been no purges that killed anyone with the slightest bit of talent?
A Junta is likely to be based on a staff committee in finest Soviet fashion, so you'd probably see a coalition of Stavka generals forming the core of a military version of the Politburo. The generals will claim as a pretext probably that there was internal upheaval at the top and the initial putsch is necessary for order and stability. The NKVD's leadership and the Commissars are the obvious first targets of any purge as Trotsky is extremely unlikely to develop either as much as Stalin did, so both are both the first, obvious targets of the generals and their removal means the Party has the Andrew Jackson problem: they can make any decree they want but they have no power to enforce them.
The Junta is likely to give lip service to Marxist ideology but in practice the USSR winds up very solidly influenced by its core of ex-Tsarist officials, militarily and economically in all probability stronger in a sense of being more balanced in both sectors without the Stalinist legacies of purges and ham-handed industrialization, and such a USSR will if there is a Nazi Germany be able to springboard from that into control of at least the OTL WarPac with overall less upheaval due to this. Of course such a stronger USSR is unlikely to create geopolitics remotely resembling those of OTL in the first place.
Thanks for the response. There is no Nazi Germany in this scenario. Part of the butterflies.
Like any other junta.
In that case the Junta-ruled USSR may well last into the 21st Century although after a few generations of rule by the Junta it will be less USSR and more quasi-Tsarist Russia. The democracies will fear less a USSR run on these lines than they did the OTL one.