Snake Featherston
Banned
No. Stalin isn't stupid enough to start a world war.
I really hate this cliche.
You might just have a limited regional war started by Japan but nothing else.
Of course the other potentiality is due to butterflies of say, Hitler being killed on the Western Front that it may be a Trotskyite faction that takes power in the Soviet Union. Trotsky's vision of global revolution and his connections to the Red Army's more competent pre-1941 elements might well mean he'd be a flipped version of Stalin: develop a Soviet Union which has a huge, modern, and COMPETENT leadership in pursuit of global ambitions on an opportunistic basis.
In this case Trotsky's alternate Soviet Union which is both militarized and with a huge, modern army led by a leadership that has the competence the OTL Soviet military lacked would well be a scarier analogue of Nazi Germany.