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- there is no WW2 in Europe.
- Japan still gets bogged down in China, and an all-out Soviet-Japanese war develops later, that sees the Japanese lose Manchuria, Korea and southern Sakhalin to the Soviets.
- the KMT wins complete control over China and in response, the Soviets annex occupied Manchuria and their puppet states of Xinjiang, Tannu Tuva and Mongolia
- shortly afterwards, the Soviets invade Tibet to preempt the Chinese from doing so
- obviously, someone other than Stalin is in charge during all of this
- when decolonization starts, the USSR starts propping up puppet/allied regimes to varying degrees of success

(please ignore the lack of a Caspian Sea on the map, pretend you didn't notice)


Keeping in mind that Manchuria' population was only around 30 million before the PRC started heavily colonizing it with people from neighboring provinces OTL (meaning ethnic Russians might still be a plurality in the USSR as a whole by 1990, especially given the lack of Op. Barbarossa ITTL), can this alternate USSR survive and thrive better than its OTL counterpart?
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