PC: WW2 without Stalin or Hitler

kernals12

Banned
Trotsky, instead of Stalin, taking over from Lenin, as well as no Hitler, are two well worn cliches on this website, so let's combine them. If the Nazis lose the elections and the Weimar Republic continues onward, perhaps with a massive New Deal style stimulus package, how likely is it that Trostsky, in his ambitions to export the revolution, would decide to try and invade all of Europe?
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
Trotsky, instead of Stalin, taking over from Lenin, as well as no Hitler, are two well worn cliches on this website, so let's combine them. If the Nazis lose the elections and the Weimar Republic continues onward, perhaps with a massive New Deal style stimulus package, how likely is it that Trostsky, in his ambitions to export the revolution, would decide to try and invade all of Europe?

fairly unlikely
 
Without Hitler, WW2 if at all would be very different. Cannot say the same of Stalin at the start.
Continuous World-wide revolution is a good inducer for confrontation.
I could imagine a german rearmament under schleicher, Soviet occupation of Finland, Soviet/German joint invasion of Poland, French Dow on Germany and opportunistic Soviet attack on Germany.
What happens next depends on who win. Germany is in a tight spot, but might get British and scandinavian help..Italy would go that Way as well for what its worth.
 
While the Versailles Treaty and the Great Depression were necessary conditions for WWII they were not sufficient. If the Weimar Republic survives and Germany manages to recover, I expect that you'll see some of the "concessions" such as reoccupation of the Rhineland being tolerated still happen. France and Britain, facing a Weimar Republic not as aggressive/revanchist as Nazi Germany have no taste for continued enforcement of all of Versailles. Hitler and the Nazis both wanted and needed a war, remove them and the odds of WWII decrease markedly. Trotsky instead of Stalin does not make the USSR stronger in 1939, IMHO the industrialization of the USSR was pushed about as far as possible by Stalin. Things may be better ion some ways since it is unlikely purges and terror under Trotsky would be somewhat more restrained, if only because while he was not averse to these measures he was not a paranoid like Stalin.

Trotsky was for worldwide revolution, but he was sane enough to know that by itself the USSR was not going to impose that on Europe through force of arms.

Without spending pages going in to it, absent Hitler/Nazism and their racial/Germanism driving things you don't have the demands for the Sudetenland as the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, nor the Lebensraum eastern drive. No cause for the alliance of convenience to divide Poland. I'll give you Anschluß as a possibilitry, but that was not going to cause a war.
 
Trotsky was not a crazed warmongering madman, he knew how dangerous it would be if the USSR provoked a pan-Western European anti-communist crusade, and the theory of Permanent Revolution does not mean 'militarily invade all your neighbors' (Nazism on the other hand did have that as a key component)
 
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