The Soviet Union Without World War II

Macsporan

Banned
My take

Hitler remains dominant in Western Europe and forces the British to sue for peace by a Mediterranean Strategy and an enhanced naval war.

Stalin and Hitler both die in their beds some time in the mid fifties and after a time are replaced by parliamentary democracies as the ideological fervor of the one-party states winds down with time and prosperity.

The European colonial empires are destroyed by Japanese, Soviet and Nazi subversion and are up for grabs in a four-way 3rd World Cold War.

Nuclear weapons are invented a decade later but are not used by anyone because the danger they present to all mankind is immediately apparent.

The Chinese Communists are defeated and China is consolidated under the Nationalists.

America withdraws to the Western Hemisphere and never becomes a world power, but remains greatly respected by the other powers.

The world is much like it is today but much more prosperous, particularly Eastern Europe, Russia and China which is spared Mao tse Tung's grotesque totalitarian experiment.

Severe global warming becomes a problem in the late 20th century.
 
Bruce, yes, I caught that.:D

A minor point is that Japan in OTL was perhaps three months from complete exhaustion of currency reserves when FDR slapped the embargos on Japan so time is running short for Japan regardless.
 
Hitler remains dominant in Western Europe and forces the British to sue for peace by a Mediterranean Strategy and an enhanced naval war.

Stalin and Hitler both die in their beds some time in the mid fifties and after a time are replaced by parliamentary democracies as the ideological fervor of the one-party states winds down with time and prosperity.

All those Jews in the U.S.S.R would set Hitler off on one of his rampages. As for Nazi Germany turning into a parliamentary democracy. I dont think so, the idea of one-man-rule (as opposed to just one party rule) is too strong and Nazism doesn’t have the ideological malleably Marxism has.

Even in the U.S.S.R the trends towards a less tyrannical one-party state are stronger than that towarsd a parliamentary democracy. Assumeing Russians make up a larger share of the Soviet population and the economy is doing better because of no appalling WW2 damage many of the factors that brought Gorby to power may not exist…Plus without the stress and strains of total war Stalin would live longer. He aged a lot during WW2.:eek:

The European colonial empires are destroyed by Japanese, Soviet and Nazi subversion and are up for grabs in a four-way 3rd World Cold War.

Nuclear weapons are invented a decade later but are not used by anyone because the danger they present to all mankind is immediately apparent.

The Chinese Communists are defeated and China is consolidated under the Nationalists.

In fact Nuclear weapons may be even more dangerous because without the two A-Bombs dropped on Japan people wont realize just how horrid these weapons are.

China can not be consolidated under the Nationalists the KMT isnt even consolidated under itself it's just a pack of warlords. Chaing Kai-Shek is top warlord but there are many others each with their own army & ''turf''. If Mao loses then China remains a second rate power for a lot longer the ''KMT'' is too busy stealing money to invest it in builiding the country. Most of China remains under the control of local bosses and warlords who have very dubious loyalty towards the ''goverment'' in Beijing. Xinjiang remains independent as a Soviet vassal, Tibet remains independent also.

China looks like a lot of the other post-colonial tin-pot dictatorships

America withdraws to the Western Hemisphere and never becomes a world power, but remains greatly respected by the other powers.

The world is much like it is today but much more prosperous, particularly Eastern Europe, Russia and China which is spared Mao tse Tung's grotesque totalitarian experiment.

Severe global warming becomes a problem in the late 20th century.

The USA would start looking beyond it's own shores sooner or later with the growing influence of other powers the USA would likely feel compelled to act at some point.

And with no UN international law is much more hazy.

Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R are a lot more prosperous the war had a crippling effect on those nations that extended for perhaps decades.

Germany was already rich, so we can assume it'll be doing well but the Soviets will be Catching up fast in terms of industrial power so the Nazi leadership may start sweating bullets over the fact that ''sub-humans'' may soon overtake the Reich in terms of industrial/military power

China remains subject internal discord warlordism, regional insurgencies and meddling from outside powers.:p
 
Stalin never quite works up the nerve to unite Europe against him by attacking his neighbors to the west, especially after Germany (slowly) militarizes.
Dubious. Having highway from Eastern Prussia all the way to Leningrad (a.k.a Baltic Countries) is going to generate many sleepless nights in Moscow and things could indeed turn nasty.
The mass killings abate a bit: even OTL Stalin realized at some point that there was a limited supply of Soviets, and that some of his economic policies weren't working all that well. He decides to blame Beria and gives him the chop sometime around 1950, the same as he had his predecessor as the chief of the secret police.
IOTL Beria's ascention as the chief of secret police marked end of the Great Purge (quite a few peoples were released from Gulag at this point) and there was nothing of comparable scale ever since.
He also manages to find the time, sans Hitlerian distractions, to ship off most of the Soviet Unions' Jews to Siberia and Central Asia: about half of them die over the next few years.
Again, dubious. Most of accounts agree that pre-war years were actually quite OK in terms lack of of official antisemitism. A lot of OTL's events had been triggered by Stalin's vision of Israel being Soviet puppet not coming into reality.
less money being spent on the military
I can bid gold coins against eggshells that Soviet military budget would not be any smaller ITTL, as leadership is till going to be paranoid about "imperialist aggression".
soviet aeronauts perform much touted feats.
Soviet space program was an off-shot of MBR development.

of course there’d be no Israel ITL
Disagree. Jewish community of Palestine was half-million strong and naturally growing by 1939, so any TL with Britain getting rid of the Mandate is going to see a lot of political games around the community's fate and general relationships between world Jewry and powers.
It’s easy to overestimate anti-Soviet feeling but from all indications most of the population at the time were supportive of the government or at least were apolitical or apathetic ya know like people today. People may have bitched about lines etc, but that isnt really dangerous to the goverment.
Although you are right to a large degree, I can't help but wonder what would happen with this attitude in a world without WWII. A lot, and I mean A LOT, of this attitude had been caused by fear of possible war IOTL. To put it simply, mere thought about civil war or "imperialist aggression" caused by USSR's weaknes scared people to death. The saying "if only it can prevent war" (as in "we will endure anything if only it can prevent war", "Лишь бы не было войны") became the motto of many people. Would USSR avoid WWII, children of ones who does not remember Civil War of 1917-1922 would call the shots since 1950 on, and this generation would be much more likely to rock the boat and question commie authority earlier.
Also the majorty of people sent to the camps were petty criminals not ''politicals'' and I highly doubt people in the Soviet Union would much care about the fate of petty crooks
You need to know that a lot of those so-called "petty criminals" were actually half-starving and otherwise law-abiding citizens, who got into Gulag through "wheat ear law" (stealing as much as fistful of wheat ears from kolkhoz was considered a criminal offence).
since Stalin put a lot of effort trying tie Soviet communism to Russian nationalism together (he had some success here) this makes it more likely the Soviet state survives in a united form not less.:)
I would say that tie was between Russian Imperial tradition and Soviet Communism, not between Russian Nationalism and Soviet Communism. And "Imperial tradition" is not "Nationalism".

Less defense of the Soviet Union nowadays
May be yes, may be no. One has to remember that a lot of modern Anti-Soviet feelings and most vocal propaganda (names like Applebaum and Lucas spring to mind automatically) are fueled by nationalist feelings in EE countries and by their Western friends. Said countries were either ethnic dictatorships or (best case scenario) ethnic democracies themselves before Sovetization. With less toes hurt by Soviet foreign policy, you might not see that much of it. USSR could be seen as a country which started with wooden plow and ended with nukes and universal free education and health care in 30 short years.

Indeed, this poor display may be what convinces De Gaulle and other key French officers that changes are necessary while they have some months to actually make them, with emphasis on changes involving redeployment of existing tanks instead of building more.
Reorg of proposed scale renders an army useless for months, and could any army be counted on to risk such a move in the middle of the war?

The Soviet Union would have simply became a more formidable foe and grown and grown and eventually launched their own Barbrossa against Germany.
Quite possible. That's why I prefer nukes to keep all major players from doing something insanely stupid (as in "going into war with each other").

Well, as far as I know, Stalin never met a minority (possibly excepting Georgians) he didn't find suspicious.
Hell, he never met a single person he didn't find suspicious. However, ethnic deportations were largely post-1941 invention (although a lot of "independent researchers" are working overtime to present relocation of Koreans or Baltic deportations of 1941 as "ethnic cleansings", they don't fit the mould for different reasons).

Given that there is no Holocaust to make antisemitic acts look particularly nasty in this TL, I'm not sure why he's _less_ likely than OTL to crush any sort of Jewish influence (as he sees it) in the USSR.
Holocaust had pretty limited effect on Soviet minds IOTL. USSR suffered so badly, neither people nor leadership saw the fate of Jews as something exceptional (at most they thought that Hitler just had enough time to deal with Jews but would do to Slavs the same thing). So any link between OTL Holocaust and possible Soviet actions is questionnable.
 
Well, as far as I know, Stalin never met a minority (possibly excepting Georgians) he didn't find suspicious. And it wasn't just Nazis who were accusing the Jews of being "rootless cosmopolitans" - and there were lots of Jews _outside_ the USSR, in such suspicious places as the USA. Also, Jews had played a major role in the earlier days of the Bolshevik party - what were Trotsky's parents? Might they not play a role in an effort to overthrow him. Paranoid sort of guy, Stalin. And there was an increasingly strong campaign vs. any sort of independent Jewish culture after WWII, from 1948 on.

As others have pointed out, post 1948 antisemitism was tied into Israel; before WW2, after all, many Jews in Eastern Europe looked to the USSR as a role model.

What do the British have that the Japanese (with their dwindling reserves of foreign currency) can't buy elsewhere? I'm expecting the Japanese to put up with a lot of economic hardship before public discontent becomes too much for even their authoritarian government to stand. Now, a general League of Nations embargo, perhaps organized by the leadership of Shiny Happy Germany...

Bruce

Rubber, oil, etc. America was growing more and more hostile to Japan, and I could see it agreeing to an embargo in the early 1940s. From there, it's "wham, boom!"
 
CG, the French have eight months from the invasion of Poland to the strike in the West and since they were already trying to form armored divisions grabbing half of the existing French tanks makes it a matter of reassigning a small portion of the French army.
 
As others have pointed out, post 1948 antisemitism was tied into Israel;
That and unexpected success of Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. It likely brought feared question of "double loyalty" of Soviet Jews closer to surface in Stalin's mind.

before WW2, after all, many Jews in Eastern Europe looked to the USSR as a role model
I would not generalize like this. Jewish Left, as most other Left movements of the day idolized USSR, true (even those who did not, like Trotskyites, despised Stalin highjacking the revolution, not the glorious experiment itself). However, I doubt that Left represented majority of EE Jewry. However, I would say it is safe to think that majority of EE Jews considered USSR a better place to be than Nazi Germany or lands it annexed/occupied/influenced.

CG, the French have eight months from the invasion of Poland to the strike in the West
Date of German attack in the West is a hindsight knowledge and you know by now how much I hate using hindsight knowledge as explanation of people's actions in ATL. France was in war with Germany. Germany just finished Poland off. French had no way to know when would Germany attack. However, with French Army holding left bank of the Rhine and winter coming, French could gamble on Germans sitting still until spring 1940.
 
Date of German attack in the West is a hindsight knowledge and you know by now how much I hate using hindsight knowledge as explanation of people's actions in ATL. France was in war with Germany. Germany just finished Poland off. French had no way to know when would Germany attack. However, with French Army holding left bank of the Rhine and winter coming, French could gamble on Germans sitting still until spring 1940.

Actually the Dutch had been forewarned,how much this would actually have mattered is debatable.
 
As others have pointed out, post 1948 antisemitism was tied into Israel;

The fact that the USSR turned hostile to Israel over time (it was rather friendly at first to the notion of a socialistic Israel) proves nothing one way or another about Stalin's views on potentially dangerous minorities. The Soviet Union under Kruschev, etc. was certainly actively anti-Semitic in a way it hadn't been before, but it was also rather less nasty in a number of ways. How would you describe Stalin's motives for the OTL "Doctor's Plot"?

(C-goose's comment re deportations strikes me as a relevant point, although it just means Jews get shipped off to Siberia on an individual basis rather than being shipped off en masse). But what the hey, there's no real need for it in the timeline. Let the idea be gone, and never darken our towels again.

before WW2, after all, many Jews in Eastern Europe looked to the USSR as a role model. !"

Lots of gentiles did as well: I believe some of them were known as "useful idiots?" :)

(And I do apologize if I'm coming off as excessively snarky. I've haven't been getting enough sleep lately, and it makes me tense and grumpy).


Rubber, oil, etc. America was growing more and more hostile to Japan, and I could see it agreeing to an embargo in the early 1940s. From there, it's "wham, boom!"


Well, a joint US-UK embargo would be bad news: although without a Japanese invasion of SE Asia, it would probably take rather longer to materialize than OTL. The power of the China lobby OTL has at times been overstated, and without an Axis to belong to Japan doesn't look so menacing.

But upon consideration, Japan probably reaches some sort of crisis point, one way or another, before 1950.

Not sure it would be "wham, boom!" Attacking the US OTL with a badly distracted USSR and UK was nutty enough - what are they going to do, attack the Dutch East Indies and hope the UK and US don't get involved? We are talking about taking on the Dutch, the UK, and the US while the USSR watches and waits. At the very least, for this to happen I suspect we need a coup by the crazier elements in the military against the "defeatists...."

Bruce
 
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