WI: Kato Svanidze, Stalin's First Wife, Lives On

"This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."

- Joseph Stalin, on the death of his first wife, Kato Svanidze.

What if Svanidze lives a full life instead of dying of tuberculosis? It seems that, while Stalin had already met Lenin and engaged in activities with the Bolsheviks at the time of her death, he wasn't quite the murder-happy, kill-your-friend-because-he-was-walking-with-your-wife, genocidal freak he turned out to be. Would he have still been dictator eventually, and what would be Trotsky's and Bukharin's fate in this alternate USSR?

I dunno, this seems like an interesting, human PoD that isn't explored often.
 
He was off his rockers before her suicide. He was already cold hearted enough to drive her to it, after all.

Leaving aside such unsubstantiated accusation, you seem to be forgetting that Soso was always a murder-happy, jealous, swashbuckling cad. Given that Kato's death was even more Soso's fault, exactly how would Kato not dying change anything with Soso's personality?
 
That's some pure grade BS you got there. Are you trolling by any chance?
The USSR of the 1930s isn't only political repression ...
I mean that the trends that we saw in the 30s were in fact inevitable ... and even possibly necessary.
Industrialization and collectivization were needed not only to transfer the economy to new rails, it was necessary to destroy the old rural way of life, and was the beginning of urbanization.
In general, if-Trotsky (or even Alexander Kollontai) came to power, then we would have received something similar. Even a dictatorship is not an accident - Europe was a hotbed of Authoritarian and Semi-Authoritarian regimes.
 
The USSR of the 1930s isn't only political repression ...
I mean that the trends that we saw in the 30s were in fact inevitable ... and even possibly necessary.
Industrialization and collectivization were needed not only to transfer the economy to new rails, it was necessary to destroy the old rural way of life, and was the beginning of urbanization.
In general, if-Trotsky (or even Alexander Kollontai) came to power, then we would have received something similar. Even a dictatorship is not an accident - Europe was a hotbed of Authoritarian and Semi-Authoritarian regimes.

The Bolsheviks certainly were politically committed to something like Stalin's industrial and agricultural plans. I wouldn't say the OTL Stalinist path was inevitable however. There are a host of ways that the Soviets could have followed a subtly different path (for example, collectivization could have turned out better, the country could have avoided the depths of political repression, etc).

And I don't think the Stalinist path was the only way the Bolsheviks could develop the country. Allen in "Farm to Factory" analyses what a continuing NEP would have looked like and found it quite competitive with the Stalinist model over the span of a decade. Over spans of longer than a decade, a continuing NEP would be superior, while over shorter spans, for example 5 years, the Stalinist model is superior.

fasquardon
 
The Bolsheviks certainly were politically committed to something like Stalin's industrial and agricultural plans. I wouldn't say the OTL Stalinist path was inevitable however. There are a host of ways that the Soviets could have followed a subtly different path (for example, collectivization could have turned out better, the country could have avoided the depths of political repression, etc).

And I don't think the Stalinist path was the only way the Bolsheviks could develop the country. Allen in "Farm to Factory" analyses what a continuing NEP would have looked like and found it quite competitive with the Stalinist model over the span of a decade. Over spans of longer than a decade, a continuing NEP would be superior, while over shorter spans, for example 5 years, the Stalinist model is superior.

fasquardon
The deepening of the NEP led to the Chinese version - to the State Capitalism with a socialist facade. Do you know what social inequality is in the PRC? In the 1920s, the USSR received the same problems: the gap between town and countryside, poverty adjacent to the luxurious life of the NEP men ...

First, we need to recall the reasons for the emergence of the NEP. During the civil war, the basis of economic policy was "Military Communism". This system coped well with the war, but proved to be ineffective for new tasks. It must be remembered that the "Workers' Opposition" and the "Deciasts" proposed other models of economic development, but they were not suitable for the peasantry (a category that suffered from war communism, with which it was necessary to establish relations). Thus NEP is the negation of barbaric Socialism. Industrialization is the negation of the NEP, and the denial of the negation of Military Communism. Was it possible to do without kinks in collectivization? Could you do without the harsh pace of industrialization? Without massive repression (by the way the scale is really great, but it is often exaggerated)? Probably yes, but this is just a relaxed version of Stalinism.
...........

By the way - under Stalin, private business existed, for example, private factories producing furniture ... Private owners began to actively press under Khrushchev.
 
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