Excerpt from Red Star in the East: A History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to Present by Robert Graham, published Kansas University Press 2005:
Chapter 9: A Titan's Fall
The events of the night November 9th 1932 marked an indelible and permanent change in the history of the Soviet Union. One of the most charismatic and ruthless politicians in the history of the world died, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. So incredible was this event, and so far-reaching were the aftereffects, that a kudzu of hypotheses and theories, ranging from the almost plausible (Stalin was killed by officers afraid of a purge! No, it was really the Kirovists plotting to seize power!) to the improbable (Foreign governments managed to break through and assassinate him!) to the outright insane (alien shape-shifting lizards killed him to protect their secrets!) has grown up around his death. So thick and obscuring is this growth that it may be profitable to review the actual facts.
It is well attested by many members of the Party that that night Stalin and his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva had a nasty fight at a banquet being held in Stalin's honor. Afterwards, she was discovered dead in bed, a revolver by her side. Stalin fell into madness when he heard of this, throughly breaking with reality. For hours, he alternately raved at a pitch shaking the very heavens and fell into temporary catatonia exceeding the very Earth. Finally, he seized the revolver, is reputed to have muttered "I go with her", and blew his brains out.
At the age of 53, the dictator of Russia was dead.
This naturally had immediate and massive impacts on the Soviet politics of the age. The man had been slowly amassing and consolidating power into his own hands, and was jealous and suspicious of anyone else with even the faintest measure of authority. The immediate tasks for the Communist Party were therefore twofold. First, they needed to bury the tyrant. Second, they needed to find a new General Secretary. Accomplishing the first was very straightforward. Due to the nature of the wound, the General Secretary was cremated and interred in a niche in the Kremlin Necropolis. The decision of who to follow Stalin was almost as easily accomplished, with the emergency Party Congress convened that December overwhelmingly approving the popular head of the Leningrad offices of the Party, Sergei Kirov, as the new General Secretary. As a prominent member of the anti-Stalin opposition, this heralded a major change in the practices of the Soviet Communist Party, and hence the entire regime...
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My new TL (many thanks to wolfpaw122 for helping to develop it!). Comments are welcomed and encouraged; this is a preview/commentary thread in a preview/commentary forum, after all!