Lenin Survives Another 5 to 20 years

Incognito

Banned
People seem to be forgetting something: Lenin had tertiary-stage syphilis in his brain by the time he died. This not only limits how long he can live but also how productive and sane he will be. If the POD butterflies away his syphilis it may impact his personality/thinking process, making it hard to speculate what his leadership would be like.
 
Trotsky and Lenin were essentially small-time sectarians who lucked into power under very unusual circumstances. Stalin was a pragmatic operator with a talent for ruthless thuggery which went beyond that of any of the other early top Bolshevik leaders. Even if you restored Lenin's health, Stalin would figure out a way to kill him and take over.

There's an optical illusion about Trotsky and Lenin because we see them through their writings. Both were formidable prose stylists (it even comes through in translation) and both were creative thinkers within the framework of their ideology. Lenin was even in some ways a profound thinker. This obscures the fact that neither of them had any special managerial, bureaucratic or political talents; they seem to have been oblivious to the importance of patronage in building the new state, leaving it to the bumpkin Stalin as a minor detail of political life. Furthermore, Lenin and Trotsky both seem to have been rather deficient in people skills and emotional IQ, alienating people right and left throughout their adult lives. Neither could have been elected as a dog catcher in U.S. politics. Stalin could have been--he could have become mayor in Al Capone's Chicago, and then taken the mob away from Capone and become mayor-godfather.
 
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Warsie

Banned
How did Lenin get Syphilis? Also, someone here wrote an ATL with Lenin alive. In the timeling, Lenin accepts Hitler's offer to take in all the Jews.
 

Incognito

Banned
How did Lenin get Syphilis?
How do people usually get syphilis? :rolleyes:

Checking wiki, it appears that Lenin’s syphilis was not “official”:

Wikipedia said:
Despite the official diagnosis of death from stroke consequences, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov reported that Lenin died of neurosyphilis, according to a publication by V.Lerner and colleagues in the European Journal of Neurology in 2004. The authors also note that 'It is possible that future DNA technology applied to Lenin's preserved brain material could ultimately establish or disprove neurosyphilis as the primary cause of Lenin's death'
 
The whole "rapid industrialization at the expense of the peasants" (as one of my high-school history books describes it) was Trotsky's idea, which Stalin stole.
 
The whole "rapid industrialization at the expense of the peasants" (as one of my high-school history books describes it) was Trotsky's idea, which Stalin stole.

Don't know if Trotsky originated it, but he did support it early on, which is ironically, one of the things Stalin used against him in the post-Lenin maneuverings. Stalin allied with the 'right' (odd concept when talking about Bolsheviks) to get rid of Trotsky and several other prominent 'leftists', then turned around and implemented it. I'm not sure if it would have been implemented as ruthlessly or effectively under someone other than Stalin.

Among the issues: would Trotsky (or Lenin or someone else other than Stalin) be willing to go to reactionary capitalists like Ford for advice on building Soviet industry? Willingness to go to Capitalist experts on mass production was a lot of what made Soviet industrialization so successful, but it must have been a bitter thing for the Soviet regime to accept.
 
Among the issues: would Trotsky (or Lenin or someone else other than Stalin) be willing to go to reactionary capitalists like Ford for advice on building Soviet industry? Willingness to go to Capitalist experts on mass production was a lot of what made Soviet industrialization so successful, but it must have been a bitter thing for the Soviet regime to accept.

This was the whole rationale of the NEP (the capitalists will sell us the rope we use to hang them), so yes.
 
Would Lenin have been smart enough to realize that gaining a little chunk of rural Poland at the expense of gaining Nazi Germany as a neighbor was a bad deal? Germany could not have started World War II without a pact giving them access to Soviet raw materials, or if they started it they couldn't have sustained it long.

You know, I wish people would stop assuming that Stalin woke up in 1939 from isolationism and then ran to make a deal with Hitler. Soviet policy int he 1930s was based around cooperation and multilateral defense pacts with the West. Unfortunately, Britain and France had little interest in them. Given their perfidy over the fate of Czecsholovakia, it made sense for him to cut a deal.
 
You know, I wish people would stop assuming that Stalin woke up in 1939 from isolationism and then ran to make a deal with Hitler. Soviet policy int he 1930s was based around cooperation and multilateral defense pacts with the West. Unfortunately, Britain and France had little interest in them. Given their perfidy over the fate of Czecsholovakia, it made sense for him to cut a deal.

I'm not at all sure cutting a deal did make sense, even in the context of what the west did with Czechoslovakia. The territory the Soviets gained in Poland was militarily a very mixed blessing. They didn't have time to build up an infrastructure to support their troops there, so when the Germans invaded the troops in the occupied parts of Poland the Soviet troops there couldn't adequately fight there and couldn't get out of the German pincers in a timely manner.

The Soviets had more than two choices in August 1939. Yes, signing on with the western Allies to help defend Poland was risky because it is quite possible that Britain and France would have sat back and let the Soviets do most if not all of the heavy lifting. That doesn't mean that the Soviets had to make a pact with the Germans that gave them the raw materials they needed to fight the war. The most rational option would have been to shut up and let the Germans wonder what the Soviets were going to do.

That complicates German planning considerably. Are the Soviets going to move in support of Poland? No way of knowing for sure from a German point of view. Are the Soviets going to supply the Poles with weapons? Again, no way of knowing. Maybe that deters the Germans. Even if it doesn't, it keeps the Germans from building up enough to cause the amount of destruction they did historically in the Soviet Union. The Germans advanced into the Soviet Union in very large part using Soviet oil and eating Soviet grain that Stalin traded to them. Could not have done it without that.
 
Without Stalin

With Lenin living longer, Stalin is doomed - propably killed

with this, trotzki will try to keep the revolution ongoing
this leads to more enemies earlier on, so even the nazis will be seen as "good guys" to stop the communists in europe... with this russia will be isolated and hated.

the industrial development will be less sucssesfull, so in ww2 the russians will have less industrial power, no christie to build a certain tank (so no T34.... )

the general situation in late 20ties in europe could be interesting
the germans could be instable and civil war - weimar + nazis vers. communists will lead to an early nazi germany, but with good luck wishes from uk and (partly) france

spanish civil war will be different, less support by western socialists
facism could be seen as "good counter to communism"... some european countries could go communist, like hungary, romania, bulgaria
China will get much support, so even the japanese war from 1937 could come in better light (less conflict with the us of a, if the communists in china getting stronger)

interesting plot
 
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