Exactly what I came to ask. Lenin dying caused problems no doubt, but the man wasn't the lynchpin holding the Soviet Union together, the worker's state wasn't built on his personality and it wasn't going to fall because he kicks the bucket.Just to clarify, do you intend the collapse to be CAUSED by Lenin’s death? There are a lot of events which could’ve destabilized the union through the 1920s, you’ll have to be a little more specific
I could see the right opposition taking power instead of Stalin at some point, leading to a deepening of the NEP, political liberalization, and possibly Ukraine, Belarus, and others attempting to flex their right to secession that existed on paper. You need to find a way to undermine Stalin's position drastically while avoiding Trotsky consolidating power in a similar fashion to Stalin. Perhaps after a bloody power struggle between the two, Bukharin and Rykov align with the remnants of the left opposition and a faction of the military to bring about a corrective revolution. But you could just as easily end up with a Bukharin dictatorship, which, while more moderate economically, still wouldn't tolerate secessionists.
Didn't the Russian FSR elite in the early 1990s not want to share their power with Gorbachev? Isn't that why they supported Russia's secession from the USSR?very interesting.
What if you did have a central government that did tolerate secession though?
You eventually had one in 1991.
Was there any reason for the RFSFR elite to think they would be better off without the other republics in the 1920s, as they seemed to think at the dawn of the 1990s.