WI:Stalin commits suicide in 1941

Ok, Barbarossa happens, Stalin is in shock, after a month he commits suicide. Who succedes him and what is their most likely reaction? Do they surrender to Germany or do they fight back, or some combination of the two?
 
Ok, Barbarossa happens, Stalin is in shock, after a month he commits suicide. Who succedes him and what is their most likely reaction? Do they surrender to Germany or do they fight back, or some combination of the two?

Soviet state comes apart is a very real possibility then. I would just have him have a stroke / heart attack from the pressure, pick a major defeat, there were so many to choose from that first summer.

Michael
 
Soviet state comes apart is a very real possibility then. I would just have him have a stroke / heart attack from the pressure, pick a major defeat, there were so many to choose from that first summer.

Michael

Nah, Molotov takes over as head of the CPSU, but the rest of the Politburo shares power with him until the war is over. Then the knives come out...
 

Cook

Banned
Ok, Barbarossa happens, Stalin is in shock, after a month he commits suicide. Who succedes him and what is their most likely reaction? Do they surrender to Germany or do they fight back, or some combination of the two?



If it was going to happen it’d be in those first disastrous days when Stalin took to his davka in a fit of depression.

The Stavka would take over collectively.
 
If Stalin were to die (a heart attack is a better option IMO since Stalin doesn't seem to be the suicide-prone type)right after the invasion, I don't think that the government would collectively pack up, say "fuck it", and just leave the USSR to be divided and eaten by Hitler. The inner circle of Stalin's "trusted" men would probably act as a somewhat coherent group for the war's duration (the war effort may even benefit form Stalin's absence), and then as victory neared there would be some huge, perhaps very bloody upheavals and a new guy would emerge. I don't think it would stop the USSR from establishing hegemony over Eastern Europe though.
 
Stalin wasn't a military genius the soviet union could resist without him. Maybe things would even go better for them as in places such as the Ukraine Stalin was hated and people may have had a higher morale without fearing that they might be sent back to the gulag after the war finished.
 
OTL Molotov was the one who dared to do the most toward standing in for Stalin while he was in his drunken funk. Lavrenti Beria, as head of the police, is in the best position tactically though not so much politically to seize supreme power.

I'd say that in the short run, it depends on whether Beria attempts to do so immediately. He'd probably fear that no matter how serviceable he is to either some other individual or a collective leadership, they will turn on him if he doesn't get them first because everyone feared and hated him. Then again, OTL he was in much the same position when Stalin did die in 1954, and yet he thought he could form a coalition with other Kremlin insiders* and was taken by surprise by the triumvirate of Molotov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev.

I can't name anyone of the latter two's status as of '54 to play an analogous role in '41; the Party leadership was pretty well beaten down at that time. Obviously Zhukov was in no position to take leadership then; he had neither the status nor the free time to play politics in Moscow, what with trying to fight off a Nazi invasion and all.

Nor would either a dictatorship of one (probably Molotov) nor a ruling committee dare to turn on Beria just yet, again with the big war on.

So I'm guessing a Molotov/Beria duo, Molotov taking the lead in public but everyone knowing Beria was lurking there in the background.

I wonder who Molotov would send on diplomatic missions to the West, as Stalin sent him OTL. Certainly not Beria! Those two would stay in Moscow watching each other very carefully!
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*Beria even thought he could share with other insiders his notion that at that point--1954, when Stalin died OTL--that the Soviet leadership should simply dispense with the pretext of Communist rule, abolish the Party, and simply govern through the State, as ministers of the Soviet Union. I'm sure they executed him as much for his heresy of his for the rattlesnake-like existential threat he posed for all of them!

In 1941 he would say no such thing and probably not think it.
 
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