To be honest, I think Stalin at one point genuinely believed in the ideas of the revolution, and still did to some extent considering the spartan lifestyle he lived in ...
I second that, adding to it that IMHO Stalin wouldn't have been Stalin as we know him if the paternalistic system created under Lenin hadn't been a factor in Stalin's rise to power.
The GPU, gulags, purges (not all of them negative, if the revisionist historiographer R.W. Davies is to be believed) were all there under Lenin and were simply carried over by Stalin.
but the entire process the Bolsheviks had to go through in order to cling on to existence (let alone to cling on to their position of power) virtually laid the essential groundwork for the bureaucratisation and the degeneration of the workers' regime. The failures of the Russian Revolution don't lie in the leadership (which were very much put into their positions by the mass support of the working class) or the conditions of Russia itself (which, particularly in Petrograd and the eastern cities, were just as proletarianised as Western Europe) but in the failure of the revolution to spread.
I partially agree.
The revolution was bureaucratized and "degenerated" from the very start.
Here's a quote taken from Lenin's
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
But Kautsky’s argument which I have just quoted in full represents the crux of the whole question of the Soviets. The crux is: should the Soviets aspire to become state organisations (in April 1917 the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” and at the Bolshevik Party Conference held in the same month they declared they were not satisfied with a bourgeois parliamentary republic but demanded a workers’ and peasants’ republic of the Paris Commune or Soviet type); or should the Soviets not strive for this, refrain from taking power into their hands, refrain from becoming state organisations and remain the “combat organisations” of one “class” (as Martov expressed it, embellishing by this innocent wish the fact that under Menshevik leadership the Soviets were an instrument for the subjection of the workers to the bourgeoisie)
The soviets, in taking power, had to assume a whole host of municipal duties, not to mention take up defense of the revolution itself, both of which required an immense amount of manpower and resources which one would inevitably need a highly organized bureaucracy for.
I would recommend
The Bolsheviks in Power by Alexander Rabinowitch for an excellent, full account of the early Bolshevik-led Soviet government's rapid bureaucratization.
I disagree that the revolution's failure to spread led to it becoming "degenerated" or "deformed."
The early Chinese Soviet Republic, after all, bore the stamp of the rigid party-state model (I highly suggest E.H. Carr's
Twilight of the Comintern, 1930-1935 for a good, very rare account of the Chinese Revolution as it developed under Bolshevik influence) without sacrificing proletarian democracy - in fact, by 1948, a good number of years after the theory of New Democracy had been worked out, the Chinese Revolution shifted gears over to multiparty rule.
IMHO the 1936 Soviet Constitution was a serious (failed) attempt by Stalin to make the government accountable to its electorate (see "State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s" by J. Arch Getty over on JSTOR), which had begun to atrophy in the absence of competitive elections.
The East European people's democracies were a bold attempt, IMHO, to shift away from the flawed concept of the council republic - something which Mao realized likewise in China in his 1940 piece
On New Democracy.
Personally, I have serious disagreements with Trotskyism as a means to explain the complex development of the USSR (I'm assuming that you are taking a Trotskyist approach, correct?), while also disagreeing heavily with anti-revisionism which seeks to explain the Soviet Union by means of suggesting that "revisionists" distorted an already perfected system of proletarian rule created by Stalin after his death.
As a Marxist, I try to take a realist approach to Russia's revolution.
And as to not derail this thread, I'd like to add that I strongly agree that the OP should go with a historical narrative approach to his AH.
As for the butterfly effect, I would suggest taking a liberal approach to how it affects your world.
You neither need too much or too little changes to OTL; that is, you should strike a balance between the two extremes.