Soviets conquer Europe what next?

So lets say for whatever reason the US doesn't get involved in WWII. I believe that the Soviets would eventually have liberated(conquered)all of Europe right up to the Channel. My Question is what happens next?

I think the Soviets would install puppet governments throughout Europe. But they would have to furnish these governments with troops to prop them up and to enforce Stalin's wishes. How long could this go on? Could the Soviet Union hold down Europe? I believe Nationalism would eventually reassert itself and the Soviet would be plagued with revolts all across Europe. Would the Europeans eventually prevail and gaion independence?
 
Eh, depends how reconstruction goes, and how well the Sovs convince the inhabitants that all this is a good thing. Bearing in mind there were quite a few communist/socialist elements who would be willing to collaborate in them. Now that they have access to all the industry of Western Europe, the USSR might last a bit more, but either this will result in a Soviet wank or an early Soviet collapse. However, they now have Von Braun and other assets that come with all of Germany.

Oh, and the US totally not getting involved in WW2 wouldn't be a good POD. D-day failing and the US retracting from the western front, maybe.
 

Neroon

Banned
I think the Soviets would have enough manpower to hold down their conquests, if they play the old "use native auxillaries from one province to hold down the natives in another one". Basically deploy elements of the German Peoples Army to garrison France and vice versa and so on for the other puppets.

I don't think this neccessarily means either Soviet wank or ealier collapse. If the US and Britain form an alliance they still cannot invade Britain let alone the U.S. especially once Britain gets nukes of it's own. So war should stay cold nonetheless the different map IMO.
If Russia being busy digesting Western Europe and the U.S. propping of Chiang as a counterbalance leads to a Nationalist Victory in China you got yourself a pretty big counterbalance in place.

The way this could become a Soviet Wank is if the U.S. continues to be isolationist even after the Soviets conquer western Europe. Then nothing would stop them from gobbling up Central Asia and the Middle East piece by piece. And then move on even futher.
 
Everyone seems to be ignoring that by 44-45 the Soviet manpower pool was nearly gone. If Normandy had failed (as impossible as it may seem) Bagration will be more of a Pyrrhic victory and the Red Army will grind to a halt on the Vistula with nukes detonating over German cities.

In other words: the USSR can't conquer Europe and hold it down.
 
With no Cold War the Soviets might not need to keep garrisons after the initial Communist regime has been installed. Remember that support for Communism in the post war years generally was in the 20-30 % range. That's enough a base to build on. Remember also that a number of communist states, for example Yugoslavia and Romania, didn't need any Soviet garrisons to survive.

In fact, the garrisons in my mind was primarily for defence. When there was anticommunist revolts troops still had to be brought in from the outside.

Anyway, in a scenario such as this the Comintern would still exist since there would no reason dissolve it to oblige the western allies. Expect the Comintern to move from a soviet puppet organization to a forum for relatively equal communist states. The French and German parties will hardly accept to play second violin for too long under these circumstances.

Moreover, expect the Soviet union to demilitarize heavily. There's no point in keeping an army that can drive to the Rhine if the Channel is already under communist rule. Remember that the Soviet leadership was seriously traumatized by the world war: they honestly feared an invasion coming from the west.
 
So lets say for whatever reason the US doesn't get involved in WWII. I believe that the Soviets would eventually have liberated(conquered)all of Europe right up to the Channel. My Question is what happens next?

I think the Soviets would install puppet governments throughout Europe. But they would have to furnish these governments with troops to prop them up and to enforce Stalin's wishes. How long could this go on? Could the Soviet Union hold down Europe? I believe Nationalism would eventually reassert itself and the Soviet would be plagued with revolts all across Europe. Would the Europeans eventually prevail and gaion independence?
IF, through some miracle (or Apocayplse), the Soviets DO take all of Europe and hold it down, the USA starts WW3 and nukes the Commies back to the Stone Aage. We also get nuked, but this is the idea.
 
The Soviet manpower pool was getting depleted by 44-45, but so was the German one - they were mobilizing a lot of boys and old men by late '44. But we're forgetting the British: once the Soviets overrun central Germany, no matter where Hitler decides to make his Last Stand, morale will collapse in German-occupied Italy [1], France, and the Low Countries, and the British will be in position to move in and take the surrenders of the eager-to-avoid-being-slaughtered Germans.

The Soviets will be too exhausted to countenance starting a war with their UK ally at this point, so we may get "Red Army on Rhine", but they're unlikely to take all of Europe. Rather more of Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece perhaps (although Churchill possibly beat them there with the troops): Italy is uncertain, depending on whether it was German occupied, stayed in the war, or successfully jumped ship. (Mussolini, if he stays in power, might decide that Hitler and his interests have diverged, around the time the Red Army storms into Berlin).

The US, of course, will freak out a bit, and the angry arguments over "who lost Europe" (because, of course Europe would be free out to Poland if the US had taken a hand) will make the "who lost China" debate of OTL look like an argument at the Lady Rose Gardner's Annual Tea. Various guarantees will rapidly be extended to the remaining bits of Western Europe, so some sort of Cold War seems rather likely.

Did the US fight Japan in this world, or is Japan still bogged down in China? And did Japan attack British posessions in the East? (Because if they're tied down battling Japan, the UK will have less resources available to fight in Europe, even if they conclude some sort of armistice with the Nazis).

[1] Assuming that the Italians as OTL decided to jump ship and were occupied by the Germans: of course, if there's no US involvement, the UK may not succeed in invading the peninsula, which puts the Italians in a stronger position to resist any forcible attempts by the Germans to drag them back in.

Bruce
 
Lets say Japan waited to see if Russia would be knocked out and when that doesn't happen they decide on neutrality. So I guess Japan could come into alliance with the US and Britain. Churchill would love this as Japan would adopt a pro-colonial policy to preserve their gains in China.

As far as the Italians go I see the war stalemating in North Africa with Italy dropping out of the war when the Soviets advance into Berlin. Mussiolini then forms an alliance with Churchill and De Gualle(or whoever ends up in power in France).
 
Lets say Japan waited to see if Russia would be knocked out and when that doesn't happen they decide on neutrality. So I guess Japan could come into alliance with the US and Britain. Churchill would love this as Japan would adopt a pro-colonial policy to preserve their gains in China.

No oil embargo then?

OTOH, this will sour relations between the UK and the US: a lot of Americans don't like Japan at all, and don't like the idea of their grabbing control of China, either. (Also, the longer the Japanese continue trying to subdue China, the more Chinese society is ground into dust, the better for the Communists)

As far as the Italians go I see the war stalemating in North Africa with Italy dropping out of the war when the Soviets advance into Berlin. Mussiolini then forms an alliance with Churchill and De Gualle(or whoever ends up in power in France).

No doubt, although it's going to be an uneasy alliance: France and the UK can't afford having Italy go commie, but it's sorta hard to forget that Italy was fighting on the other side quite recently. OTOH, with the Red Army right on his border, Musso has no choice but to take whatever terms the French and British care to give him in exchange for an alliance: Musso probably isn't getting Ethiopia back, for one thing.

Nukes will be along shortly: with the US not in a war, there will be no US project on the scale of the Manahttan project before the war is over, but the UK was working on their own project, and basically handed it over to the US in our history because they couldn't afford to run a program and fight a war at the same time. In this TL, they probably put more money in it once the war ends, and may cooperate with the US, depending on how quickly the US moves away from "not our problem" to "OMG, THE REDS ARE ABOUT TO OVERRUN ALL EUROPE OH NOES!!" In any event, the bomb should be along within a few years - and the USSR will have it not long after that, thanks to their fine spy program and their not untalented physicists. One wonders how many Germans will be worked to death doing the crap work, handling Plutonium, etc.

Alas for the desires of some posters for genocidal bloodshed, a preemptive war in the short interval when the UK and perhaps US have bombs and the Soviets don't is unlikely: it takes rather a while and a lot of money to build a mass-scale bomb production system, and most US politicians, oddly enough, lacked the clear preception of modern right-wing bloggers that the way to deal with a possible future threat is to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent people now.

Americans may feel less confident about their ability to change the world and in their own power. After all, the USSR and UK won the war without US help, and perhaps the atom bomb is more clearly a UK/US joint project rather than being as US-dominated as OTL. Also, the lack of a Korean war will help keep US bellicosity at a low ebb. Also, the USSR is probably going to be less pushy than it was OTL: there is no divided Berlin to act as a source of friction, there is no danger of Germany being rearmed as a western weapon, and the human losses, worse than OTL, will discourage any adventuring.

Of course, some things may change this. If an economically exhausted Japan withdraws from China (aside from Manchuria, mayhaps) and it goes Red, people will get rather panicky - and then there is Germany.

The Holocaust Deniers will be active from the start in a world in which all the deathcamps are liberated by the Soviets, and the US will be more sympathetic to Germans which they never were at war with. And the Soviets will be harsher on Germany (and Austria) than in our TL, since they don't have to worry about the impression they are making in a larger W. Germany (rump Rhinelands Germany isn't going to be much of anything for quite a while). A lot more executions, a lot more deportations - millions of Germans may be exiled to the USSR proper, to work as slave labor cleaning up the damage their countrymen inflicted. Rape, looting, starvation, corpses constantly floating up on the west bank of the Rhine as they are shot trying to flee across the river - the impressions will be nasty.

I'd expect that Stalin will ease up in time - you can't run a whole country like a gulag, and Germans will fight back out of sheer desperation and in hopes of inviting a US/UK intervention - but by the time some functional regime has been put in place and the killings and starvation come to an end, the anticommunists forces in the West will have adding a lot of new stories to their fundamental anti-Soviet texts.

Eastern Europe, probably not too different from OTL, although Finland may end up being incorporated into the USSR or at least communized in this TL. Poland: incorporated into the USSR? Hard to say: Stalin, at least initially, is going to be less concerned about making a good impression, but OTOH there still is the US to worry about, and Poles have never been particularly quiet subject peoples. Stalin may not be satisfied with letting Tito take over in Yugoslavia, and arrange for someone more dependable to take his place.

More thoughts later, perhaps.

Bruce
 
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IF, through some miracle (or Apocayplse), the Soviets DO take all of Europe and hold it down, the USA starts WW3 and nukes the Commies back to the Stone Aage. We also get nuked, but this is the idea.

But the US hasn't got involved in WW2 and most likely doesn't have nukes or the means to deliver them.

B_Munro has some good ideas for this scenario.
 
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