WI: Declaration of War against the Soviets

Is there a way that at the beginning of World War II, Stalin's Russia could have been the Axis and the Allies would fight against them? Basically, what POD would be needed to swap the roles of Germany and the Soviet Union in the war... When describing why we declared war (we being the Allies) on Nazi Germany and not the USSR on the invasion of Poland; the person i was talking to said 'We made a deal with satan to destroy the devil, we just happened to deal with the right one'... What if the two devils were switched round, what if on September 1st 1939, Western Europe declared a state of war against Russia?

Sorry if this is totally ASB... :eek:
 

The Vulture

Banned
Well, if Hitler (or some other Fuhrer) had earlier rallied the rest of Europe to a crusade against Communism, it's possible we might see a very different war.
 
Well, one could potentially have a stronger, bigger and more effective Allied intervention in revolutionary Russia in the aftermath of World War I, leading to a sort of revanche movement among the Party and the population, which could be potentially strengthened by Stalin when he assumes leadership.
 

Eurofed

Banned
Trotski's takeover in Soviet Russia would really help, or Hitler dies in the 1938 assassination attempt and successor Goring does not invade Czechoslovakia, takes a more tactful approach to Poland, and shelves Barbarossa so long that Stalin attacks first. And of course, there is the "generals overthrow the Nazis in 1938-39" PoD, such as the TL that Onkel Willie is currently developing.
 
Suppose Hughey Long had lived to defeat FDR in 1936 -- assuming forces coalescing around Father Coughlin/Charles Lindbergh/J. Edgar Hoover/ Senator Harry Byrd (D. Va.) etc. -- could achieve an FDR ouster. I think the U.S. would have been far more inclined to support Hitler as a bulwark against communism. And this would have had the strong backing of much of the British aristocracy.

I'm undecided whether this AH might have been preferable in the long run. But I suspect our current retrospective sense about FDR dominance being "inevitable" was not nearly so obvious and clearcut in the confusion of the moment.
 
I think you'd have to go clear back to WW1 and change things so that Germany is not dismembered so much at the end, so that there are not all those irredenta populations of Germans scattered amongst her neighbors, so that no matter who takes over Germany, they won't have a grudge against all their neighbors to get those populations back... if you can get a Germany is that maybe authoritarian but not aggressive (because they have no border claims), and a USSR that still loudly vows to bring bloody revolution to the whole world, then maybe we can switch the two sides...
 
This would be pretty simple to arrange.

When the Soviet Union invaded Finland, the British and French were ready to end their Phony War with Germany and go fight the Soviets. In one of the great watersheds of history, Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway, thus putting an end to that idea. If Hitler had kept low for awhile, it's very likely a war would be fought between his enemies.
 
It's actually very, very, very simple. Well, in theory. Logistically I'm not so sure about simplicity.

But Lenin and, indeed, the entire nomenklatura of Soviet Russia revised their idea of global revolution after their failure during the 1920 Soviet-Polish War. They turned inward to build communism internally instead of seeking to spread it through military force across the globe. Simply have a Soviet victory in that war. The ideology remains that the Soviet army is necessary for spreading revolution, and they can continue with their secondary plans of invading Germany. During the 1920 war, Lenin consistently stated that following a victory over Poland, it was necessary to push on into Germany. The fact that there were large Communist groups currently active in Germany at the time, especially in the SE, helped fuel this idea. The fact that they kind of died down a bit at the same time that the Soviets lost the war helped the Party rethink their stance. But, if there is a successful Soviet occupation of Poland by 1921, they may see the decline of Communist activity as a sign that Communism is under attack and proceed to invade Germany almost immediately.

You still have rabid nationalist movements in Germany seeking to take power (Nazis, et al) but then you have the rest of Europe gearing up to fend off this Soviet steamroller. With heavy US investment in Germany, the US has a profound interest and could very well get involved at the same time.

Regardless of the reasons, this probably pulls WWII forward to the 1920's unless you have idiots like Chamberlain putting the shoe of appeasement on the Soviets instead of on Berlin.
 

Eurofed

Banned
Regardless of the reasons, this probably pulls WWII forward to the 1920's unless you have idiots like Chamberlain putting the shoe of appeasement on the Soviets instead of on Berlin.

Your PoD is good (it's a variant of the Trotzkist USSR, basically) but even so, an anti-Soviet WWII is deeply unlikely in the 1920s. Even if they get Poland and stay committed to world revolution by it, after they see revolutions in Germany, Italy, and France fail, they are not going to pick a fight with whole Western Europe with 1920s Russia, it would be suicidal. they are still going to push the industrialization of Russia and modernization of the Red Army as the stronghold of world revolution. Even if they make an early committment to it in the early-mid 1920s (but not too soon, some years of NEP breathing space to the masses between the RCW and the collectivization is necessary, otherwise the Soviets risk being overthrown, they were on the verge of it soon after the RCW) without the dealy of the Stalin-Trotzki power fight (let's say the PoD entrenches Trotzki as the designated Lenin's successor), this is going to push WWII to the mid 1930s at the earliest.

Committed appeasement of Russia is less likely, a big part of appeasement was tro build up Germany as an anti-Soviet bulwark. The Western powers may still look the other side about the first or second Soviet aggression out of post-WWI war weariness, however. The Baltics are almost sure to go without a general war, they are small fry geopolitically, the Soviets may manage to grab any one of Finland or Romania or Persia too scot-free, but that's the line in the sand, next step declarations of war fling from the West like rain, and it's more likely they declare war on the second aggression, a Polish SSR is going to make the West much more suspicious of the USSR.
 
WWII in the 1920s would involve starving Russian peasants with sickles against the victorious armies of the Entente. At what point did we make Lenin and Trotsky crazy?
 
WWII in the 1920s would involve starving Russian peasants with sickles against the victorious armies of the Entente. At what point did we make Lenin and Trotsky crazy?

Remember when I said in theory the idea is simple, but logistics escape me? That's exactly what I meant.

Industrialization, collectivization, etc. would all still be going on. But if you read the collected works of Lenin published prior to the Soviet defeat at Warsaw, especially concerning the war in Poland, he honestly believed that the victory of Communism was assured. He would starve the Russian peasant, the Ukrainian, Polish. etc. for the sake of ensuring that Communist revolutions succeeded wherever they happened. It's not that he was crazy, it's that he honestly believed in the assured victory of Marxian philosophy around the world. The defeat in Poland brought Lenin to his senses and realized that even a prophesied world revolution required better equipment, a better army, and a better-fed population and allowed him to turn Soviet policy inward and begin to really address domestic concerns that had arisen out of WWI, War Communism, and NEP.
 
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