Who on earth is Simon?
Just a little joke, referencing Simon Cowell
Have you heard of something called the Butterfly Effect? Because it's something that successful and widely-read timelines on the Board utilise to accord them a logical base.
Of course I have.
The problem is, unless a country or region is so isolated from the state in which the 'Point of Departure' occurs, it is bound to be affected by the Point of Departure. Why? Because of a logical progression of cause to effect.
For example: let us suppose that in one alternate universe, Duke William of Normandy is killed at the Battle of Hastings. In the immediate timeframe, King Harold II of England has thus successfully defended his country from invasion and prevented it from being forcibly dragged into the Continental socio-cultural-economic sphere. A host of English kings- William II, Henry I, Henry II- are never born, because their ancestor has just been whacked clean over the head on Senlac field, and thus their accomplishments, or at least not in the same form in which they were propogated, disappear, or as we like to say on AH.com, are 'butterflied away.' And with that, the effects of their kingships toward wider Europe are also 'butterflied away,' because they never existed. Thus, events in England's neighbours- Ireland, Flanders, France etc- will appear altered from how they occured in our universe. And because the events in
those countries are altered, the effects of the initial POD will have wider and wider knock-on effects, like a chain of dominoes if you will. Eventually, the wider effects of the initial change- William getting killed at Hastings- will be too wide for historians to impartially judge, which is where speculative writers like you and myself step in and construct a fictional timeline, which follows the same logical rules as the historian promotes, but in nice and snazzy ways to compell your readership to...well, read on.
Yet, in this scenario which I laid out above, there are chances that the knock-on effects of the POD will not hit them for years, decades, maybe centuries. Think of the Incas. They have not heard of Duke William; they are in no way affected by his existence. In our timeline, they won't have contact with anyone European (or Asian) for centuries. You
could argue that their futures will be changed by the climactic effects of the point of departure- people living different lives = things are a bit rearranged on the ground = different cloud patterns- but I don't usually go for that because that's really hard to measure. But
even so, that is still a very valid argument for longterm change.
The problem with your point of departure- Kerensky emerges supreme over Lenin immediately after the end of WWI- is that it occurs in a world where such barriers, limiting the effects of a POD,
are as near to non-existent as you can get. Although thanks to the First World War, the globalisation of the turn of the century had been ratcheted back a few notches, this was still a world where nations, including the Soviet Union, interacted with each other not only on a diplomatic level, but on a financial, military and cultural level too. The ripples are thus going to be immense.
Yes they are. One of the major things that make it hard to get it as high-quality as you want is that it is almost impossible to pinpoint with much detail what will occur.
The first thing that occurs to me is that you've butterflied away the existence of the USSR. A platform for the propagation of international Communism on the Asian continent will now not exist. The knock-on effects of this will not only be felt in the interior of Russia, but across both the Asian and European landmasses. Poland is likely not to be invaded in the same way as it was by the Soviet Union; Pilsudski's ambition to break up the Russian Empire and great his own little
mittelleuropa will not come into conflict with any Soviet aspiration to spread the revolution westwards, but instead a natural Russian desire to secure its own borders, and so in all probability it'll end up turning into a border conflict. In any case, war or no war, relations with Poland are going to be a little different than in our timeline. If a border war does happen, is
Vilnius ever stolen from the Lithuanians by the Poles? Is the
Curzon Line ever drawn? Are the Poles within this new Russia herded into
autonomous districts, only to be dispersed and massacred during an analagous Great Purge? Does Felix Dzerzhinsky
return to his homeland to lead the revolution there, or does he remain watched by the new states security apparatus?
Well, I think that it is still possible for an ideology to be crushed in a revolution but rise again. Constitutional Democracy would be one that did do that. And I DID try to use a VERY broad brush. That may not be to your taste, but I feel it covers relevant information.
And this isn't even mentioning the amount of lives saved in the Russian Empire. You have just butterflied away the Russian Civil War. So, are the
300,000 lives of the men killed in action saved? And if they are, where do they go; what do they do? Do the thousands of '
White Russians' flee their homeland to Berlin, to Paris, to New York, and if so, will Nabokov begin his literary journey thinking up ideas under
Cambridge spires? Or do they look at Kerensky's regime and think, I can live with this, instead of looking back at a Leninist or a Stalinist regime in abject horror, as
Igor Stravinsky did, as
Marina Tsvetaeva did? Will the poems of
Anna Akhmatova continue to influence the petty writing of thousands of confined Russian housemaids, or be suppressed by a brutal cultural
nomenklatura? Will there be 7,000,000 street children by 1921 on Russian streets? Will 3,000,000 die of Typhus? Will Trotsky live, or Lenin die?
How on earth am I supposed to know whether 3,000,000 will die of Typhus? To be honest, I think the detail that is being asked here is a little OTT.
What about Germany. You say Hitler rises in your timeline. The very ideology of Nazism is likely to be altered by your POD, because there is an argument out there that suggests that the flood of White emigres fleeing the Russian Civil War to Berlin, and strains of anti-Semitism brought over by some of that group, buttressed and unified Nazi viewpoints on both the
Jews and Communism. Reading
this essay might help on exploring that topic. So, is Nazism more anti-Semitic ITTL, or less? And with no example of a Communist juggernaut in the East threatening European security, and only one far away on the North American continent by 1931, are the Nazis warnings of a Communist conspiracy taken as seriously as they are by the German electorate? Do
Communist organisations invoke that much fear, or attract that many members?
I think that with a Communist America, the threat is still there. But it is not as direct a MILITARY threat, but an economic and societal threat. And I personally don't consider White Russian views on Jews to be as influential, but we all have our own opinions on history.
For that matter, does a Great Depression still occur circa 1930? Does the opening up of Russia to full-scale industrialisation, toward Capitalism instead of Communism, in any way affect the global economy? Will Russian grain, oil and coal compete with their Canadian, American and British variants, or remain within the borders of the motherland? In fact, will Russia ever achieve the heights of production she did by 1956- able to export
3.5 million tons of grain annually- by
not collectivising? Does the
Holomodor happen?
Now here is something I think is a valid point. I have ignored the Russian economy and the potential effects of a State Capitalist Russia. I have fleetingly mentioned Russian investment in Persia etc., but I haven't really said much about it otherwise. I ask you a question here because I'm not quite sure: 'Do you think that the Russians would have more or less waste economically from a non-Communist Russia?'
There are countless other questions I can ask in order to confirm the plausibility of what you have written. You could also argue that the butterfly theory is, in itself, flawed to some degree. You could argue that the same people present in our timeline as in theres will make the same decisions as they would have done, because it was in their nature when, confronted with the dilemmas they faced in their lives, they acted on the decision they made. However, through such massive ripples in time, you have not only altered the path of their own lives, but
saved lives and killed others who would have affected the course of the decisions and actions made by the same people who appear in our own timeline. Millions of lives unextinguished, interacting with others to work toward a different world.
I just feel that alternate history, by it's nature, is largely theoretical, so we can't possibly know much about the possible, PLAUSIBLE effects of minor historical figures, especially as, even if we have a name, it is difficult to find information about such minor figures to make an educated guess on the effects.
What you could produce with such a point of divergence as you have chosen could be wonderful, a beautiful analysis on divergences in Russian culture, in European politics, in the course of science, architecture and economics; in short, a different 20th Century that, as the ripples become harder and harder to identify, could become a convincing analysis of what a world might look like without Soviet Communism. And you'd be able to do it, judging by your analyses of Afghanistan and Indonesia at certain points in their existences,
and judging by the fact that I am by no means an expert on any of this, but have the wherewithal to provide posit questions with background evidence (I.e all the Wiki links). But you haven't. What you
have done is linked islands of events that happened in our timeline through a concept- the swapping of Communism from Asia to North America- and maps, and because of that, I think plausibility in your scenario is lacking.