CaliGuy
Banned
I have a question--had Czechoslovakia been neutral during the Cold War, would it have joined NATO after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (assuming that it doesn't get avoided in this TL)?Finland didn't border the Soviet Union? It hadn't fought it during World War II? It didn't present a potential threat to Leningrad? As for no common ethnicity and threats of subversion, during the Great Terror of the 1930's, "In Karelia, he [Zhdanov] violently attacked the leadership-—Irglis, Gylling, Rovio, and others, all of whom were arrested as Finnish spies. All the ten Finnish-language newspapers were closed down." https://books.google.com/books?id=ubXQSk2qfXMC&pg=PA222
I don't doubt the strategic importance of Czechoslovakia. But if there had been a Communist seizure of power in Finland, people would say that it was inevitable because of course Stalin would never allow a non-Communist Finland--which had resisted his demands in 1939 and fought him in both the Winter War and later in the Continuation War--to continue to exist, especially given its proximity to Leningrad....
In any event, the internal political situation of Czechoslovakia did matter in that it allowed the Communists to seize power *without* the use of Soviet troops. I am not saying that Stalin would not have used them if necessary but "The newly released documents argue against the currently widespread version, which claims that the Kremlin considered it appropriate for the Soviet Army in Hungary to move towards the frontier with Czechoslovakia or even to enter Czechoslovak territory. It is clear from the telegrams, that the Soviet leadership considered the Soviet demonstration of military might at the frontier with Czechoslovakia, which according to Zorin Premier Gottwald and General Secretary Slansky were demanding, to be inappropriate..." http://web.archive.org/web/20030709111152/http://www.usd.cas.cz/usdeng/zorin.html
Basically, I am curious about this considering that, if Czechoslovakia remains neutral after the end of the Cold War in this TL, NATO's logistics are going to be extremely burdensome and problematic due to the fact that there will be a chain of neutral states from Switzerland to Ukraine in the middle of the NATO bloc. Thus, if one would have wanted to get German, or Polish, or Baltic troops to the Balkans, one would have needed to go all of the way around France!