Would this lead to Nuclear war between the USA and the USSR? Would the USSR stand a chance of actually surviving till the 21st century? All in all, I'd love to hear your opinions as well as what'd you think of some other guy rose to power instead of Gorbachev, so what do you think?
There were neo-Stalinists in the CPSU in the mid-1980's and there were reformists whose private views verged on Bukharinism (remember that Bukharin had
almost been posthumously rehabilitated under Khrushchev). But there were very few Trotksyists; there was perhaps some interest in Trotsky among a few dissident Marxist intellectuals like Boris Kagarlitsky, but that was it, and these people were hardly likely to rise to power. For most Communists interested in "reform" there was nothing appealing about Trotsky who had been in favor of militarizing labor in 1920, who in the mid-1920's was more anti-peasant than Stalin., etc. And the same is true of the Soviet public at large. As for Communists who wanted to keep the command economy, the one-party system, etc., they had been trained to view Trotsky as the evil nemesis of "Leninism"--i.e., of the actually existing CPSU.
If somehow it did happen I don't see how it would result in a war with the US, since there is no evidence that Trotsky advocated Soviet military adventurism abroad (as opposed to support of revolutions) more than Stalin and his successors did, as I note at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...he-ussr-and-not-germany.439460/#post-16701705 But of course Trotsky had died so long before the 1980's that establishing what a "Trotskyist" foreign policy would be under conditions vastly different from those existing during Trotsky's lifetime seems to me futile.