The Soviet Union without Stalin?

[WolfBear]

What would the Soviet Union without Stalin have looked like? Let's say that Stalin gets killed in action in the Soviet-Polish War or something like that. Who would lead the Soviet Union after Lenin's death in this TL and how would they deal with various issues, such as industrialization, forced collectivization, and the rise of the Nazis in Germany? For instance, in regards to the last item here, could the Soviet Union's leadership push the German Communists to form a unity government with the SPD and Zentrum in order to block the Nazis from ever coming to power in Germany? Would they actually be smart enough to do this by seeing the danger that Hitler posed to the Soviet Union way ahead of time?

Thoughts on all of this?

 

[WolfBear]

@Skallagrim @sillygoose @raharris1973 @stevep @History Learner Any thoughts on this?

Also, why isn't stevep showing up here any longer? Did something happen to him?

 

[sillygoose]

I was just reading about someone who suggested Stalin wasn't inevitable and Bukharin could have actually ended up as the leader of the USSR when he was at the peak of power in 1926-28. And of course unicorns and rainbows would result. Seriously though he was interested in continuing the NEP and avoiding the forced collectivization and industrialization that Stalin demanded, as he was afraid of the consequences. Other than that he was also interested in socialism in one country and removing Trotsky and the rest of the revolutionary left in an alliance with Stalin.

Nikolai Bukharin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bukharin was worried by the prospect of Stalin's plan, which he feared would lead to "military-feudal exploitation" of the peasantry. Bukharin did want the Soviet Union to achieve industrialization but he preferred the more moderate approach of offering the peasants the opportunity to become prosperous, which would lead to greater grain production for sale abroad. Bukharin pressed his views throughout 1928 in meetings of the Politburo and at the Communist Party Congress, insisting that enforced grain requisition would be counterproductive, as War Communism had been a decade earlier.[19]

Bukharin's support for the continuation of the NEP was not popular with higher Party cadres, and his slogan to peasants, "Enrich yourselves!" and proposal to achieve socialism "at snail's pace" left him vulnerable to attacks first by Zinoviev and later by Stalin. Stalin attacked Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviations and declaring that the revolution would be at risk without a strong policy that encouraged rapid industrialization.

His plans for assassination would have to succeed and not be leaked:

Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level positions within the Communist party. The details of his meeting with Kamenev, to whom he confided that Stalin was "Genghis Khan" and changed policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by the Trotskyist press and subjected him to accusations of factionalism. Jules Humbert-Droz, a former ally and friend of Bukharin,[15] wrote that in spring 1929, Bukharin told him that he had formed an alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and that they were planning to use individual terror (assassination) to get rid of Stalin.[20] Eventually, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern and the editorship of Pravda in April 1929, and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.[21]

He'd probably be much more democratic:

Even after his fall, Bukharin still did some important work for the Party. For example, he helped write the 1936 Soviet constitution. Bukharin believed the constitution would guarantee real democratization. There is some evidence that Bukharin was thinking of evolution toward some kind of two-party or at least two-slate elections.[18] Boris Nikolaevsky reported that Bukharin said: "A second party is necessary. If there is only one electoral list, without opposition, that's equivalent to Nazism."[23] Grigory Tokaev, a Soviet defector and admirer of Bukharin, reported that: "Stalin aimed at one party dictatorship and complete centralisation. Bukharin envisaged several parties and even nationalist parties, and stood for the maximum of decentralisation."[24]

I'm not sure he'd necessarily take a different position on the Nazis as Stalin though, at least at first, but he'd likely be less willing to cut a deal with Hitler in 1939 which would prevent WW2. Of course the entire course of the USSR being far less bloody might well change history well before this point in ways we can't even predict. Though perhaps because of his relative benign mentality he could end up purged himself with someone else in charge (hard to predict).

 

[WolfBear]

I was just reading about someone who suggested Stalin wasn't inevitable and Bukharin could have actually ended up as the leader of the USSR when he was at the peak of power in 1926-28. And of course unicorns and rainbows would result. Seriously though he was interested in continuing the NEP and avoiding the forced collectivization and industrialization that Stalin demanded, as he was afraid of the consequences. Other than that he was also interested in socialism in one country and removing Trotsky and the rest of the revolutionary left in an alliance with Stalin.

Nikolai Bukharin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

His plans for assassination would have to succeed and not be leaked:


He'd probably be much more democratic:


I'm not sure he'd necessarily take a different position on the Nazis as Stalin though, at least at first, but he'd likely be less willing to cut a deal with Hitler in 1939 which would prevent WW2. Of course the entire course of the USSR being far less bloody might well change history well before this point in ways we can't even predict. Though perhaps because of his relative benign mentality he could end up purged himself with someone else in charge (hard to predict).

The comment about two parties reminded me of a question that one of my dad's university friends back in the Soviet Union asked in one of his classes: Specifically, he asked whether there could be two Communist parties in the Soviet Union instead of just one Communist party. Suffice to say that this single question severely hurt his grade in that class afterwards. This friend currently lives in Israel, where he moved to around 1990 while the Soviet Union was collapsing.