Something that bugs me about "No-Hitler WI" scenarios.

It is a common theme in a non-nazi Germany to eventually have Stalin going crazy and attacking Europe.

And, when we see Stalin's actual record of aggressive wars, he doesn't appears very impressive: Finland kicked his ass. I know they lost in the end, but on their terms.

So, why is the "No Hitler = Commie Europe" theme so common?
 
Red Alert being arguably the most famous 'No Hitler' Alternate History helps. The scenario doesn't really make sense though, Stalin wasn't a gambler and at best his chances of victory were 'doubtful'.
 
It is a common theme in a non-nazi Germany to eventually have Stalin going crazy and attacking Europe.

And, when we see Stalin's actual record of aggressive wars, he doesn't appears very impressive: Finland kicked his ass. I know they lost in the end, but on their terms.

So, why is the "No Hitler = Commie Europe" theme so common?

My story, that I'm sticking to, is that Stalin would indeed be constantly preparing for an offensive war west--and never launch it, because the attack isn't ready (and he knows it) until there's a competent command hierarchy in place, and he'd keep purging generals and the followers promoted in the wake of their rise because an army competent to attack Germany is an army capable of plotting a coup against himself. Stalin just keeps building elaborate houses of cards and then knocking them down again.

As a general rule, Marxist-Leninist regimes tended not to actually attack, but to have both warlike rhetoric and preparations (fully justified by the resolution of anti-Marxist powers to bring them down) that in turn seemed to justify Western fears they would pull a Hitler any day now. But there's a different dynamic at work in these types of command societies than in capitalist-based ones, which indeed will probably attack someone someday soon once they've built up the arms for it.

Also, when someone else stirred up trouble, or attacked them, their responses tended to include opportunistic seizure of territory; this also makes them look Hitlerian, to someone who doesn't look at the context.
 
Well, Gaddis's interpretation of "socialism in one country" in his post-Cold War book We Know Now seems to describe Stalin's vision of a world socialist order as something like a greater Russian empire rather than a more internationalist "Communist UN" that I suspect Trotsky's vision would have turned out to be.

Of course, attacking West (unless some kind of opportunistic deal with made--with Germany to destroy Poland per OTL, or maybe with France to destroy Germany) will provoke a lot of powerful people against the USSR.

Now Japan is a different story. Not so many friends and some wounded pride to deal with...
 
It's chiefly because people assume Stalinism and Nazism were more directly comparable than they actually were. In 96% of everything the two were indistinguishable, however the USSR invariably avoided starting big wars and sought to limit and contain the spread of any such wars. Stalin was a cautious man myopically obsessed with furthering his own power. Hitler was a reckless gambler who succeeded most dramatically by refuge in audacity, bluffiing, and high-stakes gambling. Stalin's more boring in terms of alternate history than Hitler but Stalin ruled from 1929-53, having been the most powerful man in the USSR through the 1920s as it was anyhow, where Hitler lasted 12 years and that was that.
 

Devvy

Donor
If the Soviets had won or at least done significantly better in the Polish - Soviet War, do you think the USSR would of been more aggressive in expanding it's reach?
 
If the Soviets had won or at least done significantly better in the Polish - Soviet War, do you think the USSR would of been more aggressive in expanding it's reach?

No. The USSR's leadership as a whole learned a good lesson that its ends far outstripped its means. If it should somehow win the Battle of Warsaw (which is no mean feat as the Polish Army was far larger than the White armies the Red Army had to move Heaven and Earth to defeat) that plus Wrangel will simply mean its boundaries are further west, no more and no less. The Soviets were never very aggressive, their most clear-cut act of blatant aggression was the invasion of Afghanistan. No member of the Soviet leadership is like Hitler the gambler. Or even Saddam Hussein.
 

amphibulous

Banned
My story, that I'm sticking to, is that Stalin would indeed be constantly preparing for an offensive war west--and never launch it, because the attack isn't ready (and he knows it) until there's a competent command hierarchy in place, and he'd keep purging generals and the followers promoted in the wake of their rise because an army competent to attack Germany is an army capable of plotting a coup against himself. Stalin just keeps building elaborate houses of cards and then knocking them down again.

That seems highly credible. Perhaps the main danger is that the Russians would launch a war for internal political/economic reasons - as in "Red Storm Rising."
 
Without a Reich drawing all the attention, I'm not even sure Stalin would risk trying to grab land that belonged to the former Russian Empire. Sure, it makes for interesting writing, but trying to move in to territory without friends (or accomplesses) to back you up.
 
Well, I guess the question is whether Stalin might:
A) Find a decent CB somewhere; and
B) Find some way to measure the timidity of the Western powers against some sort of aggressive action.

If he can pull both of those off, it's possible that he attempts something somewhere...but I'm also inclined to suspect that he'd wait for Japan to over-extend itself (as Japan seems to have been on course to do eventually for most of the late 1930s), cook up a CB while the rest of Europe is hot and bothered at Japanese misbehavior, and then try to move there.
 
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