WI: Soviet Union was more involved in the Pacific

I am trying to come up with a plausible scenario that involves the Soviet Union being involved with the Pacific war from the beginning with a POD of no earlier then 1936. Is this possible? Is there anything that can put the Soviets in open war against the Japanese for the entirety of the war?
 
The easiest way is to have japan declare war on Soviet. Probably not the answer your looking for though.
 
Japan had two border incidents (Lake Khasan and Nomonhan). Japan was squashed on both occassions which is why Japan didn't DoW the Soviets after the kick off of Operation Barbarossa. You could have one of those escalate. IOTL Stalin didn't let them escalate because he was wary of Nazi-Germany since everyone in both Moscow and Berlin knew that war was inevitable, it was just a matter of who striked first. Stalin didn't want to denude the western border. If there's no German threat he will order the Red Army to steamroller the Japanese in Manchuria and get involved in a 2-3 year war, leading to an entirely communist Korean peninsula and an earlier victory in the Chinese Civil War for Mao Zedong.

You'd have to change the German leadership to one that can satisfy itself with a state of Cold War with the Soviets, watching it collapse economically and puppetizing the eastern European states and dominating them economically and organizing them into something a defence/economic block, a combination of the EU and NATO (without the US of course) or a regime that's friendly to the USSR, although that would be hard to get as conservatism and anti-communism were both deeply entrenched in Germany after 1936.

This way Stalin can risk exposing his western frontier without inciting German aggression.
 
An important reason the 1939 war did not escalate was due to the Richard Sorge spy ring which informed Stalin the Japanese had no desire for further hostilities. If this information was not available the conflict may not have been as easy to contain.

Another possibility is if Japan does better in 1939, and then publicly brag about it (in OTL the war was kept quiet by both sides, Japan out of embarrassment, the Soviets out of secrecy). Stalin may have no choice but seek a rematch to reestablish the deterrent value of the Red Army. The reason the Winter War with Finland eventually involved a million Soviets was due to its initial, and very humiliating Soviet setbacks.
 
The Soviets had plans making a big navy, tread(s) somewhere on AH.com, take it from there.
 
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