Soviet Performance in a War with Germany in 1939 Without Stalin Ever Being in Power

If you have the necessary experts in country. Russia of the 1920s suffered from serious brain drain besides capital flight. Does TTL USSR still cut a deal with Germany in the 1920s? Do they hire foreign experts from abroad like Fred Koch?

They did not have too many options and part of the NEP involved invitation of a foreign capital (or course, there was elaborate schema of how to cheat these companies later but this is a different issue). Buying equipment and attracting specialists also was going on, hence the massive sale of the confiscated jewels and works of art.
 
I don't see why not, nothing much has changed except that Russia has a less bloodthristy leader.

One of the reasons Koch did not renew his contract/s was his disgust with the draconian discipline of the Lennist era & his disillusionment with it getting worse as Stalin took over. If, the next set of leaders are less 'forceful' perhaps the USSR retains a higher number of foreign experts? The Depression is just around the corner & more will be looking for work from circa 1930.
 
I'm well aware of the Red Terror, but that's not really strong evidence that the alternative to Stalin would go on a similar bloody rampage against his fellow Bolsheviks.

The "fellow Bolsheviks" were the most worthless and loathsome part of the people killed by the Soviet regime so this specifics of Stalin's regime is the least troublesome and destructive. Most of them had been the mass murderers themselves.
 
Most of the 200,000 plus purged party members or most of the two million party members? ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/01/soviettrot.htm). Hyperbole isn’t really necessary on an alternate history forum, with an educated public such as here it weakens your argument.

"Fellow Bolsheviks" was clearly referencing to the leadership level but, anyway, a big part of the rank and file had been routinely involved in at least some kind of the Party "activities" during Revolution and RCW (killing "class enemies", looting and murdering the peasants, etc.). Anyway, Party's ideology included extermination of the hostile classes (and, in general, everybody who resists the regime) which means that those who did volunteer to become its members had been OK with the notion of killing people based on their social affiliation.

Anyway, while it was (for a while) fashionable to present the executed communists as innocent victims of a regime, the fact remains that they were voluntarily contributing to creation of a truly terrible system. Unless you are insisting that majority of them had been a bunch of the clinically-certified idiots with absolutely no idea about what they are doing, victim-hood idea is not going to work.
 
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(^^^) Pending documentation as we abundantly obtained from the "other" criminal regime, we remain in the realm of speculation about how deep the criminality reached down into the rank and file. What we have is woefully incomplete in the Russian case. And let us remember, that human beings in the midst of violent political revolution generally seldom come out of it to establish their new social order with clean hands. That goes for many "clean" revolutions, even the two most famous ones that occurred during the "Enlightenment".
 
we remain in the realm of speculation about how deep the criminality reached down into the rank and file.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s work on lower order nomenklatura and their role in driving party and specialist purging in order to achieve promotion is good on the institutional tendency in the 1930s to bloodletting. This is institutional though.

As far as collectivisation and Machine tractor stations I think we’d discover an “ordinary Soviet citizen” structure in place.

Too many of historians of horror like making big claims instead of minutiae and minutes.

As far as clean hands go, at least in the most famous enlightenment revolution, when the revolution destroyed its own basis and attacks the class which benefitted from the revolution, along with “the people,” we normally call that “reaction.” Compare to the less famous revolution, I’ve not heard of extralegal massacres of loyalists after the military moment of the revolution. As far as state organised massacres of federalists or their opposition, I’ve heard naught. On the other hand that revolution had rule of law prior to its flourescence.
 
The bloke who couldn't even make it to Warsaw in 1920? Fat chance.


This is such a bad comment that I had to log in and reply to it even though I have many ideas on what would happen, I have to comment on this specific line first and alone because it is so ridiculous.


The first obvious thing is that if I write poorly on a test that does not mean I will never get better and are incapable of learning for all time, and my talents are frozen and I can not come back and do better.

The second thing is that you are comparing totally different things with many variables, equipment, training, morale and many other variables

The whole comment is one of the most ridiculous comments ever made, and I have seen it before. It is so ridiculous and often only gets applied to non German and non Anglo commanders. If a German commander preforms badly then that is almost never mentioned and dragging up something that would have happened 19-20 years ago for a German commander would never happen.
 

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This is such a bad comment that I had to log in and reply to it even though I have many ideas on what would happen, I have to comment on this specific line first and alone because it is so ridiculous.


The first obvious thing is that if I write poorly on a test that does not mean I will never get better and are incapable of learning for all time, and my talents are frozen and I can not come back and do better.

The second thing is that you are comparing totally different things with many variables, equipment, training, morale and many other variables

The whole comment is one of the most ridiculous comments ever made, and I have seen it before. It is so ridiculous and often only gets applied to non German and non Anglo commanders. If a German commander preforms badly then that is almost never mentioned and dragging up something that would have happened 19-20 years ago for a German commander would never happen.
So other than you just repeating over and over how you don't like it, do you have an argument how he'd actually be able to be so exceptionally improved by in 1939 to singlehandedly get the Red Army to Berlin by 1941? BTW my flippant reply was to mock the similarly silly comment I was responding to.
 
So other than you just repeating over and over how you don't like it, do you have an argument how he'd actually be able to be so exceptionally improved by in 1939 to singlehandedly get the Red Army to Berlin by 1941? BTW my flippant reply was to mock the similarly silly comment I was responding to.

Point, 1942 or 43 seems more likely. I don't see how the Red Army can push all the way to Berlin in 6 months.
 
Your continued unnecessary use of hyperbole leads me to believe you lack the meaningful reading to have a meaningful opinion. Good day. Good life.
Your continued usage of the word ‘hyperbole” clearly indicates that you do not know the subject too well.
 
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s work on lower order nomenklatura and their role in driving party and specialist purging in order to achieve promotion is good on the institutional tendency in the 1930s to bloodletting. This is institutional though.

Hmm. good point and good source. I seem to remember some writing by Tupelov, the aircraft bureau chief, that might be directly applicable as anecdotal evidence.

I’ve not heard of extralegal massacres of loyalists after the military moment of the revolution. As far as state organised massacres of federalists or their opposition, I’ve heard naught. On the other hand that revolution had rule of law prior to its flourescence.

I have in mind the vicious backwoods fighting in South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina that was mixed up with the usual First Nations raids and frontier massacres. Post unpleasantness there was something of an emigration in two directions, as large elements of those on the losing side in the south fled to Jamaica and Bermuda. Those who felt so inclined or were encouraged by their neighbors to seek a new life in the north fled into the Canadian territories. There was some "encouragement" to pack them off. We have sufficient documentation for it to notice it.

As for the other revolution, I always thought it was interrupted and overtaken by a "caudillo" who derailed its natural progression for half a century (a few decades even after he was packed off it was counter-revolutioned.), but your point is well taken. It could be called "reactionary" much as the Stalinist late 1920s phase of the Russian revolution appears to me. My opinion of course. YMMV applies and can and always should vary in such a case.
 
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