Yes, I agree. Stalin WAS the willpower of the USSR. I doubt that anyone else could have exerted the sheer mental strength (brutality....) to bring the USSR to victory. He was the towering player of realpolitik in the 20th century. In my view no Western leader comes close. Of course, Western leaders did not have his unfettered freedom of action, so my comment is not meant to endorse the Stalinist system, merely to point out the man's political achievements....think the Tudor age, not post 1900.
USSR has center-left coup, much less cold war, when do humans get to Moon?
- Thread starter GeographyDude
- Start date
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I think there’s at least been scenarios that, what if Rommel under the Nazis has used his army to assert political power and make the first move, would other military commanders have followed him?
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Jerry Linenger, the guy in the light blue suit, was in space from Jan. 12 - May 24, 1997, a little in the Shuttle at the beginning and end of his journey, but mostly on the Mir Space Station.
I still don’t think we make it to the Moon by 2019.
Even in a richer world. Even with a Cold War fought mostly on the economic realm which actually turns out to be a bonanza for developing nations in the Third World as many of them get sweetheart trade deals from both superpowers. In addition to the East Asian Miracle (OTL), we’d have four or five similar examples. Not every nation is rich, but many of them are.
I still don’t think there’s enough economic, or other, incentive to spend all that money to go to the Moon!
I agree. The goal of the moon was the result of a space race that began with the first Sputnik. I think modern safety standards would have prevented a manned landing to this day, though we probably would have collected moon rocks with robotic probes. Another point, our current microchip technology today would be way behind without that lunar program.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Documentary evidence that Comrade Secretary General is hard at work! Almost sounds rather ginned up, doesn't it?
Now, mainstream view doesn't mean Sun, Moon, and stars! But neither should it be too quickly dismissed.
I'm counting 11 days in which the guy was quiet without a statement.
Last I read anything on this, it wasn't clear that Rommel was ready to back a coup. He might have been part of the von Stauffenberg bomb plot, he might not. And the German officer corps were committed to avoiding the mistakes of WW1, where as they saw it, their fore-runners had given up too easily.
The German military were solidly behind Hitler after the win over Czechoslovakia (and even before that, I think it's doubtful that any serious coup would be attempted). The plots of OTL are pretty notable in their shambolic nature.
Funnily enough, the Soviets were pretty honest about their paperwork. Much like the Nazis, they filled out the paperwork for their crimes in triplicate and filed it away...
The mainstream view that was put together at at time when we knew very little about Stalin besides the propaganda when he ran the Soviet Union and the propaganda put out by his enemies. It has now been thoroughly debunked. Absolute War by Chris Bellamy devotes most of a chapter to it, going through the myth, the inconsistencies in the myth, the evidence against it, and our current best understanding of what actually happened.
At no point was Stalin in danger from his own side.
fasquardon
Yes, I can see how this would be important to any Russian government left, right, or center.
So, post-WWII, I can see how a center-left Soviet Union would be highly motivated to keep satellite governments in eastern Europe for the sake of a warm water port.
But this may not mean lending assistance to the North Koreans early on, or the North Vietnamese, or an array of rebel armies in Africa and Latin America.
North Korea does have ports.. And Vietnam most assuradly has warm water ports S do places like Cuba.. Problem is they are not Soviet soil..
Now on the other hand.. Getting a real warm water port on the open sea is well.. Gonna be a rough gig. Since those nations are neither Russian.. Never been Russian, yes I know Bulgarians are actually from Russia.. But what ever.. Bulgaria was never Russian...
Next up turkey. Iran, pakistan
No dice
In Europe you could say kaliningrad.. Or the former east Prussia, is a warmish kinda cold port that doesn't freeze over.
I agree that an aim to be a sea power is a constant want.. But beJesus.. Get to the sea and for what it is.. That was port Arthur and Vladivostok.. And port Arthur ended so well for the navy.
Too many concerns and not enough rational thinking. Russia wasn't going to nor will ever get the straights.
As to the op. If others are doing it first, America will want in and America will want a win and then parade said win until the cows come home.
Crimey most firsts were held by the soviets.
Hey look America went to the moon..
Okay..
Not underselling the achievement by any means or underselling the accomplishments of nasa.
I will say this, if the soviets are doing thr space thing and its win win win.. Space is just as useless now.
Better bet is soviets get there first.
America will scramble and go for the moon and Mars.
Crimey most firsts were held by the soviets.
Hey look America went to the moon..
Okay..
Not underselling the achievement by any means or underselling the accomplishments of nasa.
I will say this, if the soviets are doing thr space thing and its win win win.. Space is just as useless now.
Better bet is soviets get there first.
America will scramble and go for the moon and Mars.
Keep in mind that the lions share of Russian trade went through the Dardanelles before the Revolution. It wasn't completely mad. And if Russia had held on to the end of WW1, they were due to get the straits, so it's not a "never ever" thing, just the other major powers need to be desperate enough to back the Russians. Definitely the straits weren't worth what the Russians invested to try to obtain them though.
Mmm, space is pretty useful. Just... Not the new American frontier science fiction authors sold it as.
Call me an optimist, but I think the first moonlanding would happen in the 70s or the 80s.
Landing people on the moon is, in the final analysis, relatively easy. At least, relative to going anywhere beyond the Earth-Moon system and to building any sort of permanent base, even in orbit. And of course, being first one to the moon gives bragging rights.
Likely it would use smaller rockets, building up a moon ship over multiple launches and using techniques like orbital propellant depots. Something with power between the American Titan III and the Soviet Proton (or American Saturn IB) would probably be the cheapest overall. Going later also means less need for dedicated R&D - technology was advancing fast so a mission in the 70s or 80s could use more off-the-shelf components. Possibly it would even be an international mission.
Likely, without an intense Cold War derailing things, whatever space programs grow up are more sustainable and smaller scale than NASA at its height. But that, I think, would be a good thing. The US has only been looking for the next Apollo program for the last 50 years.
That said, the moon landings in TTL would be as OTL. A few landings, and then no moonbase. But taking the slower path to the moon means there'd be more infrastructure to send robot probes there - or indeed bigger robot probes further out.
But even if I'm being too optimistic, I suspect the moon landings would happen before 2019. As technology advances, the extra cost to nip over to the moon over what countries need to do in space anyway if they want to be a major power (launch their own civilian and military satellites) falls lower and lower.
fasquardon
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Safety, and how we conceptualize it, is actually a pretty deep topic. We seem to select some aspects we really focus on and others (such as continued high motor-vehicle injuries and fatalities) which we relatively ignore. But then we could ask, How could it be any different?
* as one approach, William Langewiesche has written about concept of “system accident,” and I think he’s particularly insightful when he talks about the airliner crash in the Florida Everglades on May 11, 1996.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Stories true, false, and in-between are going to have inconsistencies! That part shouldn't surprise us one iota.
And then, I urge us, don't fall in the "first debunk trap." Like I think happens with some skeptics of global warming. Perhaps they felt like someone was trying to trick them and play them with the original theory, maybe they even believed in it too completely or too quickly. But, for whatever reason, they latched onto a "debunking," and there they are stuck. I think this is pretty much of a human pattern which plays out in a number of circumstances.
The circumstances in the Reich, where there was still a complete, professional, and generally independent officer corps are very different, in fact almost the exact opposite, of the conditions in the Soviet Union, not just under Stalin (although they were arguably the worst during his and Beria's reign) but from virtually the establishment of the Soviet state to the collapse of that sorry institution.
In the Wehrmacht, Herr, Luftwaffe and KM officers had command, made battlefield decisions based on combat conditions (within the admittedly often idiotic requirements of Hitler), and spent little or no time, especially at the field level, looking over their shoulder. Prior to the attempted coup there was not even much in the way of Gestapo presence below divisional level; it existed, but an NCO would not find themselves a private on the Eastern Front for a whisper about the field rations.
In the Red Army there was a NKVD Commissar attached to every level of command all the way down to platoon, all of whom were dedicated to ensuring absolute loyalty and proper ideological purity, as well as planted informers in nearly every platoon (although this was often difficult to maintain 100% of the time due to the utterly shocking losses in many formations). There were also entirely independent NKVD units attached to each division, specifically charged with discovering "wreckers and defeatists" (i.e. anyone who has heard to utter the slightest complaint about the Party or about orders). Being denounced as a defeatist was a terminal disease, officers were stripped of rank and sent to, if fortunate, the Gulag, if unfortunate to mine clearing units or other penal battalions. Worse, their wives, sometimes children and parents would also be sent either to the Gulag or internal exile. In even the most lenient cases they would lose their apartments/dachas and wind up sharing space with two or three other families in a two room apartment (or worse) and go from having reasonable rations to sawdust bread.
The entire Soviet system was designed to make a coup effectively impossible. The original Bolsheviks understood, ever so well, how lax surveillance allowed them to rise to power and took all the steps necessary to ensure that no one would pull the same trick on them. Stalin, of course, took that institutional paranoia and raised it to the level of a religion, but it existed right up to the collapse of the Soviet state. The only way for the state to change was to have the unique set of circumstance that appeared in the very late '80s and first years of the '90s.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I'm glad the guy could learn from his mistakes, as costly as they were.
And David Reynolds is both the person writing and the maker of the BBC documentary 1941 and the Man of Steel, from 2011. And he's saying, one week into the fighting, "Although the evidence remains controversial, it seems . . . "
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That and the Bolsheviks were terrified of their revolution going the way the French Revolution did, and end up being partially dismantled after a popular general had taken control via coup. (Though I would argue that Napoleon acted as a valuable editor who threw out alot of the ideas that weren't working in revolutionary France, to the Bolsheviks he was a bourgeois wrecker retarded the liberal revolution in France.)
That's a valid point. But still, you're talking about a situation where we only have one source that claims Stalin had a major breakdown (Khrushchev, who was no-where near Moscow or Stalin during the period in question) and multiple sources that paint a very different picture.
I did remember wrongly what the book says however, so let me set the record straight now I've checked my source.
Both witnesses and Stalin's diary (and indeed the fact that major decisions were being taken in the Soviet Union, which is unthinkable if Stalin fell apart in the way Khrushchev claims) show Stalin working extremely long days from June 22nd to June 28th. Then Minsk falls, and Stalin seems to be shocked and unnerved by the news. Witnesses and his diary show Stalin then has few appointments on June 29th and June 30th and he seems to withdraw. His chief lieutenants discuss the matter and are concerned that this could lead to a coup if it goes on and they cook up a draft law to give Stalin massive powers and make him commander in chief of the Soviet Union and go to his dacha on the evening of June 30th. When Stalin receives them, he seems closed off and nervous, and several of them think afterwards that he may have been afraid they were the coup coming to liquidate him. Needless to say, when presented with even more power instead of a short trip to Beria's rose garden, Stalin accepts and July 1st he is back at work doing a normal work-load.
Given that Khrushchev had ample reason to lie (knowingly or not) and was exactly the sort of guy to bombastically over-embelish on nuggets of truth, I do not think that Khrushchev is more credible than Molotov, Zhukov, Kaganovitch and the rest of the people who actually saw Stalin during those 10 days.
And yes, Stalin perhaps had a 2 day breakdown, but having seen nervous breakdowns, I am dubious that Stalin had a full breakdown since he bounces back a little too quick. But hey, maybe the guy was just that tough. Alternatively, he'd been working a gruelling schedule for 6 days at that point, Stalin could simply had needed to catch up on sleep. Or maybe he just needed to take some time away from the hustle and bustle of trying to overcome the blitz with paperwork and needed to think things through.
Still, there's some scope for us to consider a shift in the Soviet regime during those two days. Possibly, Stalin's lieutenants arrive on the evening of the 30th and Stalin really has had a nervous breakdown. I have a hard time seeing them coldly disposing of Stalin, since many of this group were not only admirers of Stalin, but also men who considered Stalin a good friend. If Stalin isn't in a fit state to resume his old duties, let alone take on the new duties and powers they wanted him to, perhaps they make Stalin a figurehead while working out how to spread Stalin's workload among themselves. Given how big a role Stalin's conception of foreign relations has in shaping the early cold war, it's easy to imagine a more flexible mind being given the foreign relations portfolio on June 30th and then keeping it in the 1945-1953 period where they deal with the US and Europe much better leading to a much more friendly US-Soviet rivalry (as I've said before, I don't think it's really possible to completely avoid the Cold War - not without a much earlier PoD - likely one in the Russian Revolution or before WW1).
A military coup seems very unlikely indeed, especially since the military power of the Soviet Union was mostly locked in a deadly struggle with the wehrmacht at this point. For it to be a risk, I think Stalin's lieutenants would need to eat a whole bunch of lead paint and Stalin himself would need to stay withdrawn for a considerable time. And even if Stalin did basically become completely unfit for work, likely his successor will be from the Party, and will be his full legal successor - i.e. the major lieutenants will agree amongst themselves who will be the chief and the Supreme Soviet and the party bureaucracy will rubber stamp it in accordance with the letter of the law. In other words, not a coup. But still, that could be enough of a change to basically make the Cold War so much less important that the US-Soviet rivalry isn't strong enough to drive anything like Apollo.
fasquardon
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
In fact, I’ve heard that Nazi field commanders had even greater latitude to adapt to circumstances than did American field commanders.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I may quibble how much if this was in place before the Nazi invasion of June 22, 1941. But mainly I’m going to run a
heart of hearts argument,
There could have easily been a Soviet colonel who outwardly was a good boy, but inwardly had real doubts about the show trials on the ‘30s. And now Stalin ignores warnings, outrageously at first orders troops nor to fight back, and a week later breaks down and slinks away.
And if this colonel, newly-minted general, maybe major ? had enough men loyal to him in which he could make the first move and present it to other commanders as a right-now choice (in which it’s obvious that we intelligently slow down the Nazis and run production facilities 24 hours a day), and I do like the part where the secret police building is already surrounded,
good chance he could have been successful.
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Ian_W
Banned
I think people are getting too hung up on the first phrase (and, arguably, they had one with Khrushchev and the Secret Speech anyway).
Lets deal with the second phrase - "much less cold war".
Assume Beria wins the power struggle. Yep, Beria, one of the least pleasant people of the whole short 20th century.
He goes ahead with the 1953 plan for Peaceful Co-existance based around a buffer state of a unified but neutral Germany.
Yes, it takes two to tango. The US would need to agree to this, and while the East Germans would do what they are told, the West Germans would get a vote as well.
You then have a nice tension-reducing buffer state in the middle of Europe.
This paper has some more details, including some rather rapid changes of line in East Germany.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFAEC.pdf
The link between ICBMs, manned rockets, Mobile Orbiting Laboratories for missile-warning telescopes and the Moon as a location for the same were very real in the 1950s and 1960s.
On the other hand, you had proposals for cooperation.
https://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/coldWarCoOp.html
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4225/documentation/competition/competition.htm
Lets deal with the second phrase - "much less cold war".
Assume Beria wins the power struggle. Yep, Beria, one of the least pleasant people of the whole short 20th century.
He goes ahead with the 1953 plan for Peaceful Co-existance based around a buffer state of a unified but neutral Germany.
Yes, it takes two to tango. The US would need to agree to this, and while the East Germans would do what they are told, the West Germans would get a vote as well.
You then have a nice tension-reducing buffer state in the middle of Europe.
This paper has some more details, including some rather rapid changes of line in East Germany.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFAEC.pdf
The link between ICBMs, manned rockets, Mobile Orbiting Laboratories for missile-warning telescopes and the Moon as a location for the same were very real in the 1950s and 1960s.
On the other hand, you had proposals for cooperation.
https://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/coldWarCoOp.html
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4225/documentation/competition/competition.htm
hammo1j
Donor
The could Russia have done better under a less brutal leader is intriguing.
1. The more primitive a society the more a need for brutality. At the lowest level chimp style dominance is the norm.
2.The bigger a society the more a need for brutality. More interests with more daggers.
3. The more under threat a society the more a need for brutality. Democracies have shoot to kill curfews for extreme emergencies.
4. The more a society undergoes rapid change the more the need for brutality. Persons status jumps up and down causing unrest.
The SU had a combination of these 4. It is quite possible JS found himself as leader through natural selection.
Did we make the mistake of removing Hussein, Gadaffi, Assad without thinking that being a complete sociopath may be the only way to hold these countries together?
1. The more primitive a society the more a need for brutality. At the lowest level chimp style dominance is the norm.
2.The bigger a society the more a need for brutality. More interests with more daggers.
3. The more under threat a society the more a need for brutality. Democracies have shoot to kill curfews for extreme emergencies.
4. The more a society undergoes rapid change the more the need for brutality. Persons status jumps up and down causing unrest.
The SU had a combination of these 4. It is quite possible JS found himself as leader through natural selection.
Did we make the mistake of removing Hussein, Gadaffi, Assad without thinking that being a complete sociopath may be the only way to hold these countries together?
OK, so there's not much in the way of evidence to support those 4 assertions. And your final question is extremely problematic. Just because Hussein, Gadhaffi and Assad brutalized their countries does not mean that brutality was needed. And just because there were flawed attempts to remove them that created even more violence does not mean that we should conclude "people we deem primitive are best ruled by criminal dictators".
For one thing, it has been shown over and over that what humans deem primitive tends to have more to do with who of their neighbours they want to dehumanize and otherize so they don't need to feel bad about doing bad things to them. (Like helping brutal dictators gain power.)
fasquardon
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
With just a two day mini-breakdown, a coup would be harder, but still possible.
And I’d like to see a pretty good source that Khrushchev is the source of the bigger breakdown theory.