WI: Stalin dies in October 1945

Stalin was far from a physically healthy man by the late 1940s. Heavy drinking and smoking, combined with a sporadic sleeping pattern and the strains of the Second World War took a massive toll on Uncle Joe. In 1945, Stalin suffered several health scares, including a major heart attack in October of that year.

So what happens if the General-Secretary kicks the bucket eight years early? How will the chips of power fall? Kruschev is still overseeing farming quotas in Ukraine, the young Kosygin is still rising but hasn't suffered demotion either, Molotov has yet to see his wife dragged off by the NKVD, along with a lot of his political standing, Zhukov is still the people's hero, overseeing the Soviet Sector in Germany, while as ever Beria is by the sidelines.

Who will prove triumphant and how will it effect post-war relations?

EDIT: My bad, could a mod kindly move this thread over to post-1900 please?
 
My first instinct for a Stalin successor is Kalinin. Of course, he's scheduled to die in 1946 anyway. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about his politics to say what he would do.
 
Either that, or Beria takes over and cynically opens the Gulags to soften the Soviet people up for the hammer-blow he'll lay down later on.

If Zhukov has any political instincts and knows anything about Beria's dirty secrets at all, he would be in a position to bump off Beria, then establish a military government a la Poland in 1981.
 
Either that, or Beria takes over and cynically opens the Gulags to soften the Soviet people up for the hammer-blow he'll lay down later on.

If Zhukov has any political instincts and knows anything about Beria's dirty secrets at all, he would be in a position to bump off Beria, then establish a military government a la Poland in 1981.

Beria was quick to jump for power in 1953, so I wouldn't be surprised for him trying it in 1945, with his odd combination of ultra-despotic secret policing and liberal economic and foreign policy. On Zhukov, Krushchev later claimed that as Defence Minister in the late 1950s, the Marshal had been planning a coup in the face of massive cuts to the conventional military budget. However Zhukov said he had very little political interest or will outside of the military. Frankly I think it was Krushchev thinking up an excuse to remove an ultra-popular opposition figure at a time when he was pushing through controversial reforms.

Regardless, I doubt Zhukov would be keen on Beria turning over East Germany to a neutral buffer state, taking Marshall Aid and subserving the Red Army to his NKVD paramilitaries.

Say Zhukov aids a putsch on Beria, followed by a more politically astute general like Bulganin or Voroshilov taking the reigns of power in return for making the Red Army Zhukov's domain?
 
Beria was the man everyone feared. OTL, the Troika of Molotov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev moved fast to pre-empt him and had him killed after a quick "trial."

I'd guess that in '45 Molotov would look around for allies to do the same; Zhukov seems like a likely recruit for this mission. Not sure who else would seem suitable, suitably reliable and suitably brave to go up against the Soviet secret policeman who had the goods on the lot of them. Molotov might have the guts to do it because of his very high position; the two men were obvious rivals for supremacy and Beria is the one everyone hated because they feared him--but if Molotov did not move fast, he'd probably be dead shortly afterward. I'm guessing Zhukov would never move on his own initiative but might well back an appeal from Molotov; that would give the general the legitimacy to act. I'm not sure if Molotov would even think he'd need someone else too, or how many he might need. I imagine that if they succeed in eliminating Beria, then both men subsequently would have their mutual suspicions of each other but would be able to negotiate deals that work well enough for policy to go forward, and this balance of power might create space for other parties to come forward and create a more "collegial" Presidium much as eventually did happen under Khrushchev and his successors, where no one man ever held unchecked supreme power though of course one was typically seen as most important--that one either getting his way or being ousted. In such a system I would expect Khrushchev to rise higher eventually.
 
To expand a bit and consider alternatives:

Beria certainly did have the notion that the USSR could abolish the Party, back off from its commitment to radical socialism, and the current apparatchiks ("suitably" purged and streamlined of course!) could simply rule directly via an autocratic Soviet state, with none of the pretense that the Soviet Union was a democratic republic whose people just happened to routinely vote for the Communist Party with 99.995 percent margins because the Bolsheviks were just such swell guys. All this sounds progressive and reasonable to (most) Western ears, right?

Well, I think the consensus among the rulers that this was all dangerous nonsense is pretty well verified by the events of 1991, and it would have been even more so in 1952 or 1945. The odd "church-state" division between Party and Soviet state that seems so quaint and redundant actually served important functions and if Beria thought he could just ditch it, that's where he was a dummy.

Now while it was widely known, at least in high ruling circles, that Beria had these notions by 1952, I am not at all sure even he thought this way in 1945, and if he did I'm pretty sure (though I could be wrong about this) he kept these notions very much to himself, if he knew what was good for him. So perhaps Beria could seize power without the other apparatchiks realizing he had such ideas.

But I really don't think he could seize power at all exclusively in his own name. His role while Stalin lived was to serve as Stalin's attack dog; he was the "bad cop." (A very very bad cop indeed!) He made Stalin look merciful and appealing by comparison--considering that many Soviet citizens had no illusions about how ruthless the Vozd could be, that says a lot for how chilling Beria's reputation was. The thought of this attack dog running around loose not on Stalin's leash anymore must have been too terrifying to contemplate, and I think Beria understood that full well.

His best shot at survival then would be to find allies quickly, that he could plausibly be seen as again subordinate to; the logical candidate again seems to be Molotov, as Stalin's widely known right-hand man.

So, whether Beria survives or not is a race between his putting himself fully at Molotov's service against all rivals and Molotov's decision he'd best eliminate Beria. In the former case, the Stalinist regime continues, modified only by the difference between Molotov and Stalin. I daresay Molotov wasn't quite the politician Stalin was (though he was pretty well honed by then) and might have slipped up, perhaps in a way that might tempt Beria to try to take over on his own behalf which would surely begin with killing Molotov. After that--would Beria be able to hang on on his own? Maybe, though I doubt it--the more likely outcome seems to me to be a bloody civil war in the high apparatus which might degenerate into mass civil war in the Union as a whole.

And if he does manage to hang on anyhow, with suitable mixes of purge and bribery, and does try for his "normalization" scheme, that will trigger off another round of unrest and probably doom the USSR to collapse, unless the apparatchiks belatedly eliminate him then.

OTL Molotov lived until the 1960s; if he hangs on and the greater stresses of his position (not that he was rolling in puppies OTL once Khrushchev purged him) don't prematurely age him, we might see essentially a continuation of a basically Stalinist type of regime, probably more moderated and nuanced by Molotov's more cosmopolitan (if still hard-edged and ruthless) world-view, but continuing something like a decade longer. I have no idea how long Beria would have lived if he weren't killed, but presumably when he died there would have been a successor for his position.
 
Actually, Molotov lived until the late eighties. God knows how that would work out had he succeeded.

What would happent to Zhdanov here? Presumably he would throw his lot in with the anti-Beria faction, should it emerge?
 
I happened across Anastas Mikoyan's entry on the Turtledove wiki and it mentions in OTL he had very good survival skills under Stalin. Chances are, if he has any kind of political base in the Soviet hierarchy, he could figure out who the winner would be.

If nothing else I would suggest that Beria would be a target simply because the head of the secret police usually has secrets other people don't want let out. In the USA, where people don't get shot when leaderships change, J. Edgar Hoover was rumored to be able to insulate himself from being cashiered because he knew things about top US officials they had rather wished he didn't know.
 
Zhdanov was fast becoming Stalin's favourite by 1945 and his only power seems to have been over culture and propaganda but I think this only makes him a bigger target for everyone else. If Beria gets involved, I smell the Leningrad Affair three years early, with Zhdanov still alive to suffer as well.

Beria is certainly in a stronger position than 1953 - for one he is still in charge of a unified NKVD, with his Georgian clique still running the show.

Molotov seems an obvious successor but what are his views of Beria? Would he tolerate him at all? Also although an unrepetent Stalinist (plus a big Mao fan) until his death, what would Molotov's foreign policy be like? Basically I'm wondering how much control Stalin had over Molotov and the Foreign Commissariat and considering some of the absolute diplomatic stinkers the Soviets pulled off in the late 1940s, be interesting to know who to blame.
 
The one thing that does get butterflied away is Stalin's resumption of the Purges on a renewed scale after the war, since any new leader, whether out of cynicism or idealism, would likely realize the easiest way to help things would be to stop them - in particular, stopping Soviet soldiers from being thrown into the Gulag just because they had a cigarette with a US soldier, for example.

There were some real domestic stinkers on Stalin's part, too. :eek:
 
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