All righty! Here's one to think about! Say that through a combination of luck or circumstance, there is no Iron Curtain/Warsaw Pact? By that I mean Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Romania and Bulgaria were all liberated by the Wesr and or their own governments and thus were not under the USSR's sphere of influence?
What does that mean for the USSR and geopolitics as a whole?
An older thread similar to this mentioned how the USSR would very likely step off the world stage and we would not have much of a Cold War.
China would likely still fall to Mao, but here Korea stays unified. What would be some rammifications on how Stalin and Mao would react?