Josef Stalin is killed at the Battle of Tsaritsyn in 1920

King Thomas

Banned
Trotsky takes over and tries to spread Communism to other countries. There are still purges but not quite as bad as OTL.
 

Deleted member 1487

Trotsky may take over and probably destroys the USSR trying to spread the revolution. If he doesn't there are several other important members that might rule by committee, probably manages a middle ground of cultivating the revolution between Stalinist excess and Trotskyist permanent revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism
 
During the Red counteroffensive on Tsaritsyn, Josef Stalin is killed in the fighting. Now what?

Er, didn't Stalin's involvement in Tsaritsyn take place in 1918? As I recall, during 1920, he was busy with other things (like fucking up the Red Army's Warsaw offensive in Poland). :confused:

(A very minor detail, to be sure. I wish the bastard had died at Tsaritsyn, no matter what year it occurred in.)
 
If Trotsky had achieved power and kept control, might he have attempted something like the Maoist Cutural Revolution, wlith the resulting chaos and loss of life that China endured?
 
Trotsky may take over and probably destroys the USSR trying to spread the revolution. If he doesn't there are several other important members that might rule by committee, probably manages a middle ground of cultivating the revolution between Stalinist excess and Trotskyist permanent revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism

Wasn't Trotsky disliked by most of the party due to his terrible people skills? Man wasn't really a politician, I think its unlikely that he could take the top spot after Lenin's death.

I think it more likely that a collective leadership succeeds Lenin, and pursues middle-ground policies similar to what you describe at the end there.

Question is, who would this collective Bolshevik leadership consist of?
 

Deleted member 1487

Wasn't Trotsky disliked by most of the party due to his terrible people skills? Man wasn't really a politician, I think its unlikely that he could take the top spot after Lenin's death.

I think it more likely that a collective leadership succeeds Lenin, and pursues middle-ground policies similar to what you describe at the end there.

Question is, who would this collective Bolshevik leadership consist of?
I wish I knew; I know very little about 1920s Soviet politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Rise_to_power
Lenin died of a stroke on 21 January 1924. Following Lenin's death, a power struggle began, which involved the following seven Politburo members:[26] Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Tomsky, Leon Trotsky, and Grigory Zinoviev.
 

LordKalvert

Banned
Wasn't Trotsky disliked by most of the party due to his terrible people skills? Man wasn't really a politician, I think its unlikely that he could take the top spot after Lenin's death.

I think it more likely that a collective leadership succeeds Lenin, and pursues middle-ground policies similar to what you describe at the end there.

Question is, who would this collective Bolshevik leadership consist of?

Trotsky had the army- that's usually enough. Just ask Pinochet and Allende
 
Trotsky had the army- that's usually enough. Just ask Pinochet and Allende

Not in the 1920s. Trotsky believed the Red Army of the Civil War as a emergency measure and afterwards advocated that it be replaced with a voluntary Peoples Militia. This made him enemies of the military leadership, both the ex-Tsarists and the "new school" generals who had made their name in the Civil War, who either advocated for an entirely professional army (Tukhachevsky) or a professional but Communist indoctrinated professional officer corps who would lead a mass conscript army (Frunze). That last option ultimately won out, but not absolutely so until 1942.
 
I wish I knew; I know very little about 1920s Soviet politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Rise_to_power

Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Tomsky, Leon Trotsky, and Grigory Zinoviev.

With Stalin dead, could these men work out some sort of power-sharing arrangement between them to institute a collective leadership after Lenin's death, or did they hate each other too much or were some of them too power-hungry (like Stalin) for this to ever work?
 
That leads me to wonder where Trotsky would concentrate his efforts, once he has stabilized the country. He could go for Poland again, or former states under the Russian Empire. Or he could negotiate with Mao and win over Asia to fight the Nationalists and Japan.
 
You'd probably see some sort of collective leadership instead of a Trotsky takeover, the man was a poor politician and had no support from the army. Odds are collective leadership under a democratic centralist framework would be the prevailing model.
 
People assuming Trotsky would take power if no Stalin is such a bad AH cliché. The man had almost no friend in the central committee. He is only cited because he is the other most known people in the leadership of the Soviet Union of the era and because Stalin propped him up as the official internal enemy.

Less known people like Kamenev, Bukharin, Dzerjinski or Rykov (among others) would probably take power as a committee (like before everyone in the Politburo was either ultra loyal to Stalin or too scared to do anything). People in the politburo or their allies outside it might be purged if the rest of the politburo allied against them, but i think most of them would probably survive.
 
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