So, either the whole Soviet Union, or just Beria, depending on how you look at it?
I'm not sure how seriously you mean this, but I know there really are people who think the Stalinist era was a time of spineless lick-spittles doing the bidding of a single psychopath, so please excuse me while I go into this in excessive detail.
From the evidence, it is clear that some people absolutely did suck up to Stalin. However, it is also clear now that we have had a look inside Communist Party archives that Stalin also extensively consulted with his subordinates during decision making and was open to having his mind changed by the people in his inner circle. For example Beria, the most egregious lick-spittle I can think of, also was willing to argue with his boss when he thought something needed to be done a certain way.
As such, I think it is a mistake to give Stalin too much credit. He was an extremely important cog in the Soviet machine and is probably the most powerful a human being has ever been inside their society. But nonetheless the system was built on Lenin's bad ideas and the uncompromising effort to impose those ideas whatever real people did in response to those ideas was a big part of what made the Soviet Union so brutal and murderous. Stalin was a particularly bad zealot, but Stalin was often implementing ideas that had general support in the party, so I am pretty confident that the USSR would have still been brutal and murderous if for some reason Stalin had been shot.
There's also the problem of groupthink. Since Stalin had been in given so much power to promote people in the Party from the early 20s on, since the Civil War had been so polarizing and since Lenin was such an apparent beacon of success, many of the people who could succeed Stalin agreed with him on far too many points.
TL;DR, Stalin was powerful, but there was alot more wrong in the Soviet Union than just Stalin.
Thankye.
Were those positions really enough that he'd be in the running for the top job in 1941?
Khrushchev getting the top job so early would be quite fascinating. I would be surprised if he was able to decisively centralize power in his hands with the immanent German invasion (heck, he took 4-5 years after Stalin's death to cement his power in OTL), but even as first among equals, I bet he could change things in interesting ways in WW2. And him becoming sole boss in the post WW2 period would be really interesting. I suspect some sort of cold war was inevitable so long as the USSR didn't follow the British path of surrendering in the face of overwhelming US advantage, but it could be very, very different if it started under Khrushchev.
Also, the immediate aftermath of WW2 was probably the best chance of liberalizing the Soviet system without causing the country to implode. I am very, very tempted to write a TL based on this idea.
I need to find a good biography covering this part of Khrushchev's life though though.
What was Mikoyan's preferred labour motivation strategy?
Personally I am rather dubious about the "buffer of fraternal states" being remotely worth it. In OTL, the satellites discredited Soviet Communism when they seemed to be doing well and discredited Soviet Communism when they seemed to be doing badly. The whole thing seems a rather graphic illustration of why it is a bad idea to get too involved in the internal politics of your neighbours... Contrast this with Cold War Soviet-Finnish relations, which saw much less Soviet intervention in Finnish internal affairs and a much more useful buffer.
fasquardon
