So I'm working on an AH setting for an RPG thing. The whole thing would take a while to go into and involves some major behind-the-scenes ASBery (basically think Delta Green if you know what that is), but for the alt-history aspect I'm trying to keep to a realistic basis.
The initial PoD is this: in spring of 1983, a group of hardliners within the Soviet government led by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov execute a coup, removing Andropov (who was basically dying at the time, IOTL he lasted until February '84) and installing either Ogarkov or Dmitriy Ustinov as Premier/General Secretary. Things go more or less as IOTL with intensifying tension and a slightly different version of the KAL 007 shootdown (one proposed as actually having happened by some conspiracy theorists). Then in November, Able Archer 83 goes hot with the Soviets invading Germany as is standard in these things, brutal conventional warfare follows for about a week until the tactical nukes start flying.
Now here's the kicker: the predicted full-on exchange never actually happens. After one good volley (mostly targeting each other's strategic arsenals), an uneasy ceasefire is reached, essentially out of the realization that neither side has anything to gain at this point. On a scale of OTL to Protect & Survive or Doomsday 1983, think somewhere above Red Storm Rising but below Warday (which is a greatly underappreciated book, even with the major hindsight errors).
So I've got a decent handle on targets and the geopolitical situation in Europe, and much of the rest of the necessary stuff, but there's one thing that's causing me a bit of a conundrum. The guys behind the coup are gone, but the Soviet Union remains mostly intact (the Warsaw Pact not so much, but the USSR proper, including the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs, plus the Central Asian Republics), and I can't work out who'd be most likely to end up as its postwar leader. Initial thought was Gorbachev, but a thread on a totally different subject on Reddit brought up that for a while, it looked like Gromyko was the more likely successor to Andropov (not counting Chernenko, who barely lasted a year).
Any particular thoughts? At the moment I'm leaning towards Gromyko the more I think about it, for plot reasons maintaining an adversarial relationship between NATO and the Soviets would help considerably.