What if Stalin wasn't paranoid?

Instead of killing all the Soviet High Command, Stalin promotes them and established military schools with experts from a few countries. Stalin doesn't kill too many people unless they were really trying to commit treason. How would WWII go if Germany breaks the pact?
 
You might as well ask “what if Hitler wasn’t a megalomaniac”. Stalin’s paranoia was such a powerful influence on his personality that removing it would alter his actions and fate beyond recognition. He might never rise as high in the Bolshevik ranks he did, assuming he falls in with them in the first place.
 
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He'd have been overthrown during the Ryutin Affair. There's an old saying, it's not paranoia if everyone really is out to get you.
 
Your asking for a sane dictator which is an oxymoron.

Especially since one can argue that being dictator was the biggest factor causing Stalin to act like a mad man. Same as how cult leaders tend to turn into utter nuts when they gain complete power over everyone in their cult compound.

Now it is interesting to consider how things would have gone if Stalin were the most powerful man in the USSR, but not a dictator. Say if the Leninist revolution never happens, and the Bolsheviks, working with the Menshiviks and the left-leaning SRs win power due to the Soviets gaining power democratically from the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik-Menshivik-SR coalition would then dominate the Soviets and Stalin would be an important figure in this coalition (as he was before Lenin returned to Russia and pulled the Bolsheviks onto a different path) and it is possible that he might rise high enough to be elected leader of this democratic and socialist Russia.

Of course, even if Stalin had never become a Leninist as he did in OTL, he'd still be a Marxist. And a passionate and ruthless one at that. So however things go, he'll have his ideological blinders which will make it difficult for him to accurately predict the behaviour of capitalist republics (especially the United States) and which will mean he'll commit to bad economic policies, so it won't all be flowers and sunshine. But I suspect a non-totalitarian USSR led by a less paranoid Stalin would mean a much, much stronger USSR.

fasquardon
 
Blaming things on Stalin's paranoia ignores what Stephen Kotkin calls the "structural paranoia" of the entire Bolshevik regime. Stalin was hardly the only one who saw the USSR as an island in a sea of hostile capitalists, who would try to penetrate it by whatever means were within their reach. (At first they were thought to do this by supporting non-Bolshevik parties, but with the consolidation of the one-party system, they would naturally try to find people who would do their bidding within the Communist Party.) Kotkin notes that "Stalin’s most important declaration [on January 7, 1933] concerned a sharpening of the class struggle as the country got closer to socialism, a cudgel he had used against Bukharin in 1928 (and a concept Trotsky had articulated a decade earlier)." [my emphasis--DT] https://books.google.com/books?id=xTA7DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA116
 
Blaming things on Stalin's paranoia ignores what Stephen Kotkin calls the "structural paranoia" of the entire Bolshevik regime.

Yes... and no. The Soviets certainly had their own level of paranoia that they brought to the table from the start. It's all part and parcel with having started out as a illegal revolutionary movement that were actively hunted by the Tsars security forces: one has to develop paranoia under such conditions. But Stalin's own paranoia pushed it to new levels of extremes.
 
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