WI Stalin lives just a few more years?

Thande

Donor
Say to 1955, or 1956?

A lot of people reckon that the Doctor's Plot was an excuse to indulge in yet another purge, and this would have happened if Stalin hadn't conveniently dropped dead before it could be launched. If this is true, how would the Soviet Union be affected if Stalin had had another purge in the mid-1950s? Would people who in OTL went on to be future leaders - maybe even Krushchev himself - fall victim to it?

(I know the initial persecution was specifically against Jews, but it could well have expanded to anyone he felt like by using the 'bourgeois nationalist' angle...)
 
This has been covered before. I think if we alter the events of OTL and make it Stalin leads a healthier lifestyle and doesn't smoke, he could probably live until 1960-65, or maybe to 1970 at a push. Well, because I idolise Stalin and am a fervent believer in Stalinism, let's say he survives until 2007, becoming the oldest person in the world.

1953: World War III - Stalin invades Western Europe, America is totally destroyed and large parts of the SU are in ruins.

1990: By this time the events of World War III are history and every single nation in the world is part of the Soviet Union. At the age of 122 Stalin is the oldest person in the world and is treated as a God. However, advances in Soviet science in the 1960s have allowed Stalin to live much longer than normally. At this stage he is roughly equivalent to about an 80-year old. Due to his massive purges, the OTL world population of 6 billion is only 600,000. This makes the SU easier to manage.

2007: Joseph Stalin finally dies and Nikita Khruschev, who also benefited from advances in Soviet science, becomes General Secretary. The world population is now only 60,000 due to the 1995 African Purges and the Red Army purges of 2001 and 2002.
 
This has been covered before. I think if we alter the events of OTL and make it Stalin leads a healthier lifestyle and doesn't smoke, he could probably live until 1960-65, or maybe to 1970 at a push. Well, because I idolise Stalin and am a fervent believer in Stalinism, let's say he survives until 2007, becoming the oldest person in the world.

1953: World War III - Stalin invades Western Europe, America is totally destroyed and large parts of the SU are in ruins.

1990: By this time the events of World War III are history and every single nation in the world is part of the Soviet Union. At the age of 122 Stalin is the oldest person in the world and is treated as a God. However, advances in Soviet science in the 1960s have allowed Stalin to live much longer than normally. At this stage he is roughly equivalent to about an 80-year old. Due to his massive purges, the OTL world population of 6 billion is only 600,000. This makes the SU easier to manage.

2007: Joseph Stalin finally dies and Nikita Khruschev, who also benefited from advances in Soviet science, becomes General Secretary. The world population is now only 60,000 due to the 1995 African Purges and the Red Army purges of 2001 and 2002.

This isn't serious, is it?
 
Then again, Stalin was always a bit excessive. ;)

I know but this is practically impossible even if he managed to kill 2 million people a year that would be very shy of 5 billion by some 420 billion there is no way. Not without massive uprisings against him or WW3 being a huge war of unimaginable proportions with deaths in the billions.

Now if he used bioengineered diseases maybe this could be archived.
 
Sorry guys, I shouldn’t have been messing about.
Here’s part of a timeline where Uncle Joe lives until 1965

The Great Purges of 1953-55: Stalin decide to purge the Red Army and senior members of the Soviet Politburo: Zhukov, Molotov and Beria are among those executed after a ghastly sham trial. During 1953 and 1955 more than 2 million people are put to death at Stalin’s whim.

1956: After the purges, the Red Army is in shambles. NATO invades the USSR and by December is at the gates of Moscow. So far, only conventional warfare has been utilised. However, during 1953-56 Soviet scientists have secretly developed ICBM nuclear missiles and five are launched against Washington DC, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo.

Alright guys, carry on from here.
 
Hmm, somewhat less crazy, but why would NATO attack? The only reason either bloc would've attacked was if they felt an attack by the other was imminent. Was Stalin planning on following his purge with an offensive? That's a wee bit irrational, even for Joey (Stalin was crazy, but he wasn't a gambler). Goodness knows the West would've loved for the Soviet Empire to fall without spilling a drop of (their) blood, as it did OTL. And would such a purge work? Zhukov's execution could easily turn the Army against him. Even if the Party beats the Army in a civil war (my bet), it would shatter the Soyuz and end its ability to control the Pact states and lead the struggle against capitalism-imperialism. Watch as Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia leave the bloc to join the Non-Aligned Movement, even as they remain Communist. Score one for Tito: he comes off as an example of better Communist leadership to the world. So we get, more or less, an end to the overt cold war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and a more subtle, much more complicated struggle between the First and Third worlds. In other words, what we have now. :p
 
Well, if Stalin lives another few years, then we're likely to see some Soviet fleet carriers with Tu-91 Boots as the strike arm. Could make life interesting for NATO, likely resulting in CVA-01 staying alive.
 
Doubtful, Russia really can't compete with NATO at sea and never could. Between the USN and the RN and the French navy the Red Navy has no real chance. Every fleet carrier that is built by the Red Navy in the hopeless task of trying to match the USN is a fairly large number of tanks, artillary etc. it can't build. I think the US would have been delighted if Stalin did something that stupid.
 
Doubtful, Russia really can't compete with NATO at sea and never could. Between the USN and the RN and the French navy the Red Navy has no real chance. Every fleet carrier that is built by the Red Navy in the hopeless task of trying to match the USN is a fairly large number of tanks, artillary etc. it can't build. I think the US would have been delighted if Stalin did something that stupid.

Can they compete full out? No. But they couldn't do so with submarines either. I did misremember my history however, Stalin had changed his mind about the carrier plans he had earlier approved. Also, the carriers wouldn't be an attempt to match the USN, but rather to achieve a specific strategic or tactical requirement, such as preventing the approach of US carriers in conjunction with land based naval aviation.
 
It seems like a better tack is to think about the Stalinist policies that changed, and their after-effects after 1953. Trying to guess how much of a maniac he would have been, or how many would have been murdered, seems kind of pointless.

So...

No large-scale release of prisoners from the Gulag. Lop a few more millions off the populations of the former USSR, including children who were never born.

If we assume that the "Doctors' Plot" purge goes forward, and Stalin does away with large numbers of Soviet Jews (and forces others to waste their lives in Birobidzhan), you would probably get Israeli hostility to the USSR developing much earlier. If the USSR started cultivating clients in the Middle East under Stalin's terms, i.e. cultivating local communist dictators and forcing them to stay close to the Stalinist script, the USSR would have been viewed with great suspicion in the region-- just another meddling imperial power, not an ally.

With no secret speech by Khrushchev, no cultural thaw and no rising expectations in eastern Europe: mass deportations from East Germany after June 1953 (if the demonstrations even took place), no Hungarian revolt of 1956, no Prague Spring if Stalin stayed alive that long.

With no deviations allowed from "socialist realism" in culture, many fewer in the west would feel much motivation to move toward detente, cultural exchanges, etc., other than devoted communists and the extremely gullible. So the cold war stays extremely frosty for a longer time.

The USSR might get some short-term advantages by putting off liberalization, but when Stalin finally died, the anti-Stalinist backlash might have been an explosion and not just a relative sigh of relief.
 
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