WI Trotsky led the USSR?

Rather unlikely to happen in the first place - talk to Wolfpaw about it. Only conceivable way I can imagine would be if he were more-or-less forced into it - say, if much of the Bolshevik leadership were captured or killed in a siege, leaving primarily the military leadership.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
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Probably leaning much on the military, so many officer's from the Red Army would gain government positions. Was one of the leftists in the Communist party, so NEP would be abandoned earlier and forced collectivization would happen in the 20s. Since Trotsky did not believe in Stalin's Socialism in one State, the USSR would push a much more aggressive foreign policy.
 
Rather unlikely to happen in the first place - talk to Wolfpaw about it. Only conceivable way I can imagine would be if he were more-or-less forced into it - say, if much of the Bolshevik leadership were captured or killed in a siege, leaving primarily the military leadership.
Have to agree that Trotsky taking the leadership position will be hard to pull off. The one thing everyone agreed on in the post-Lenin succession crisis was that they had to get rid of Trotsky first. The Bolsheviks were very conscious of the French Revolution, and a lot of them were worried that Trotsky was on the verge of emulating Napoleon. It's the main reason the USSR always kept the Red Army firmly subordinate to the Party.

Eliminating the rest of the party leadership could work, but pulling that off while keeping things plausible might be a bit tricky.
 
Trotsky's vision of permanent revolution would lead him to try to foster communist terrorist movements across Eastern Europe. That gives fascism an even bigger shot in the arm than it got historically, while he would not have been much different than Stalin in terms of the paranoid butchery. In fact perhaps even worse given Trotsky was a very, very latecomer Bolshevik and would have been more insecure in power than Stalin was because he wasn't just a latecomer Bolshevik, he's also Jewish.

Hitler rises to power more decisively IOTL when his "Judaeo-Bolshevik" lies have even more plausibility. It depends on who, what, and when Trotsky purges and whether or not he'd try a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to say what happens after that.
 
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