The party hierarchy forms an intimate networked relationship with a government and specialist professional nomenklatura, with limited contacts with NEPmen. In the late 1920s to early 1940s, NEPmen, specialists, government figures, management, and a significant body of the mass party are purged in working class led and instigated purges in a variety of institutions.
In the late 1920s a pricing problem between urban and rural goods causes mass industrial worker unrest, leading to local party led forced extractions in the countryside. This forces the party into an administrative relationship with the countryside, and a sequence of famines meshes with an attempt to increase agricultural product extractions.
The 1930s are dominated by a high rate of growth underwritten by forced reinvestment of profits, high labour mobility including promotions, the urbanisation of Soviet society under the twin pressures of administrative extractions and readily available work at apparently high prices. Over time this freedom is wound back by nomenklatura management inflicting piecework based Fordist-Taylorist structures on the Soviet working class. The industrial economy is wrought with critical path shortages and logistic problems, that are often made up by low quality high volume output "storming" except in heavily protected military industries.
The state of balance of trade in the 1930s is very poor, and made worse by an unwillingness of capitalist powers to trade with the Soviet Union.
Eventually a major European fascist state attempts to hegemonise central Europe, leading to a generalised war which the Soviet Union wins easily but bloodily.
Major changes:
* GuLag never becomes economised, it remains a Slon-esque affair
* Purges concentrate far more strongly on the "immediate" class enemy of Soviet workers: specialists, management, bureaucrats. This, incidentally, is the arena in which purging your enemies results in promotion.
* The senior party is far less stringently purged, purging mainly results in potemkin village imprisonment in "soft" moments, and in "hard" moments in Slon-esque imprisonment at most.
* The International Left Opposition has a far more fluid composition without Trotsky. This does mean that James P. Cannon is still the hard nutter. The IRO probably disappears into nothingness still. Internationally communist parties still find the same right wing, nationalist, authoritarian jerks in control.
* Possibly, possibly, once every blue moon party members are allowed to freely debate the party line in a deliberative fashion.
* Foreign adventurism would be limited by the demands of the party apparatus and nomenklatura for peaceful exploitation^Wdevelopment in one country. This is balanced by the fact that Trotsky is far less timid. In practice even if Trotsky comes to a united front position, the effect in Germany is still one of a popular front (if not social-fascism). The Soviet Union is far more generous with the Spanish Republic's Marxist left than historically.
Also, 90% of the political committee as of 1922 would have had to have died in 1922 for this to be able to happen. Trotsky did not play well with others.
yours,
Sam R.