WI: Mikhail Gorbachev assassinated, replaced by a totalitarian leader

RousseauX

Donor
So basically what happened in August 1991 coup (except why would the USSR invade Finland or Romania?), except Gorbachev gets killed instead of arrested.

If problem is that the hardliners are still incompetent and the power is still split between the Soviet government and the Russian government and the military might do as they did OTL and support Yeltsin over the hardliners.

The issue is that a coup by the conservatives in the Kremlin is not going to be thought of as legitimate by the average person in Moscow nor the Russian government. And Yelstein is still going to have the legitimacy of having won an election. Power was too divided by 1991 for a Soviet government to reassert the level of control they had pre-1985.
 
Might this help Bush in 1992 ?

Part of the reason we saw a shift in the "soccer mom" vote was because they no longer had the cold war concerns. A hard line and/or civil war SU could alter that.
 
There simply wasn't an individual who was in any position to take power and turn the country towards totalitarianism in 1991. The Soviet people and bureaucracy wouldn't have accepted a totalitarian shift, not after the 1950s. At most, you could have a group of conservative Brezhnevites take over (who would be quite well received by the population in 1991) and attempt to return the country to the road it was on under Andropov - sensible measure reform. Nobody wanted a return to the Stalin period. And hardly anybody of importance even wanted a return to the Brezhnev period.
 
There are two parts to this question. If Gorbachev has been killed in a reactionary communist coup and the new leaders then clamped down on the Baltic SSRs and the Warsaw Pact, it would just signal a return to severe Cold War with the west. Finland? That would be a major break with the past and might lead to war with the west. At the least it would probably lead to Sweden joining NATO and even more massive rearmament and isolation of the USSR. As others noted, civil war in the USSR would be a real possibility. But so would be a return to totalitarianism if the new leaders handled things effectively.
 
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