What are the implications of Soviet communism collapsing during or immediately after WWII?

[Strategos' Risk]

The ongoing thread in Could the Western Bloc have gone authoritarian during the Cold War? made me think how the NATO states, especially America, were incredibly paranoid towards communism to the extent of keeping pet fascists in their pocket in case the reds ever got too far electorally speaking. (Also Operation Gladio, Paperclip, etc.) Now, certainly it would be interesting to imagine what if the Cold War was just somehow averted, which would require both the U.S. and Soviet leadership to just somehow decide to coexist, and I believe this has been theorized before.

But here's a more unusual idea I haven't really seen before except, oddly enough, in the late Stuart Slade's strategic bombing wankfest The Big One and the TBOverse: what if the Soviet system just up and died despite defeating the fascists in the process? What are the implications of the Cold War just imploding in the '40s and '50s? Yeah, communism wouldn't be completely gone, but it would be far less a bogeyman, and so perhaps U.S. society doesn't circle its ideological wagons and poison labor relations for all time.

Also, what do Dulles and all of the other interventionists and CIA covert ops guys do for the rest of the century? Does the U.S. continue FDR's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America, and never get to treating the rest of the world like how it historically treated LatAm, as it did in the Cold War?

 

[Garrison]

Well the issue is how do they win and collapse? Because one seems to preclude the other. If the USSR is able to reorganize its industry and galvanize the Red Army to rebuild and fight then the Communist grip is strong enough to hold on. Remember its not the one man bad Nazism was regardless of how indispensable Stalin might have thought he was. If you make the war harder by dialing back allied involvement, then either they lose or they take over Europe and its wholesale looting time.
I guess the only way you could thread the needle is the Soviets make some sort of deal with the Nazis in 1942-43, barely survive and then Germany goes up in a nuclear holocaust a few years later. The Red Army has been gutted by fresh purges, there's been infighting and backstabbing, possibly literal, in the Politburo. and when they try to go west to take advantage its a catastrophe, but they are technically on the winning side in the war.

 

[Beatriz]

Didn’t FDR want 4 policemen nations (US, UK, Russia and China)?

 

[Sam R.]

One problem for the Soviet People (Soviet local Nomenklatura and their networks), is that the Communist Party and Soviet Union are the best way to organise their interests after the war. So much so that the only stable opposition was the Leningrad vibe for even more real communism please possibly found in Zhadanovishchina or in 56 or 68. Having the usefulness of the Communist Party controlled Soviet Union for the people with local economic power in the Soviet Union stably transmogrify is very very difficult indeed. Even in Ural scenarios I tout that the Reserve Leadership Centre, competiting with 3 other centres all arguing the same claim, would still be organising via the Stalinised methods of the 1920s party: they're more immediately available and useful, they appeal to the vigorous youth of the day who desire vigor in the 40s (and Brezhnev in their 40s).

I can't think of a way to get a Union of Russian Controlled States without an appalling post Ural civil war where sane Germany sets up nationalist-religious client after client in retreat. And we know how difficult a sane Germany retreating from the Urals in 1945 is, don't we?

yours,
Sam R.

 

[Sam R.]

Allow me if I can to contribute something useful to the original speculation: "Soviet communism collapsing during or immediately after WWII" or "no bogeyman."

The Soviet Union had an awful fucking war. They may well have had a much more delicate one. They were capable of surviving as a Bolshevik party inspired Stalin influenced clique controlling the same space with a much more awful war indeed.

But would that Communist Soviet Union, so crippled and licking its wounds that it never bothers going beyond 1946 coalition governments with Communist Interior Ministries, be a bogeyman? So busy licking its wounds that it is in high fordism with capitalist banking and very little macro-economic game playing as in the 1930s? A wound so tempting the cat keeps licking and begging for wheat sales at below market for US loans? A Soviet Union that looks more "intermediate" state in world systems theory, a Soviet Union so tasting its puss that it appears as a semi-peripheral semi-colony to US capital like Imperial Russia appeared to French? "Who'd be afraid of the Soviet Union, they are indebted to us, sell us cheap wheat for Italy and France, and they only take the Interior ministry behind the Velvet Curtain? Why they can't even fund Czech industry!"

Perhaps rather than failure of the State or State Apparatus, that that apparatus could be forced into a subservient position which assuages Winston even? (Yes, but he's our Bitch.)

yours, hopefully helpfully,
Sam R.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

Well the issue is how do they win and collapse? Because one seems to preclude the other. If the USSR is able to reorganize its industry and galvanize the Red Army to rebuild and fight then the Communist grip is strong enough to hold on. Remember its not the one man bad Nazism was regardless of how indispensable Stalin might have thought he was. If you make the war harder by dialing back allied involvement, then either they lose or they take over Europe and its wholesale looting time.
I guess the only way you could thread the needle is the Soviets make some sort of deal with the Nazis in 1942-43, barely survive and then Germany goes up in a nuclear holocaust a few years later. The Red Army has been gutted by fresh purges, there's been infighting and backstabbing, possibly literal, in the Politburo. and when they try to go west to take advantage its a catastrophe, but they are technically on the winning side in the war.

The barely surviving USSR is the only practical path I can see. Damaged far worse than OTL, run off east of the Volga, and separatists governments survive to post war in the Baltics, Causcasus, Ukraine, etc...

 

[Strategos' Risk]

But would that Communist Soviet Union, so crippled and licking its wounds that it never bothers going beyond 1946 coalition governments with Communist Interior Ministries, be a bogeyman? So busy licking its wounds that it is in high fordism with capitalist banking and very little macro-economic game playing as in the 1930s? A wound so tempting the cat keeps licking and begging for wheat sales at below market for US loans? A Soviet Union that looks more "intermediate" state in world systems theory, a Soviet Union so tasting its puss that it appears as a semi-peripheral semi-colony to US capital like Imperial Russia appeared to French? "Who'd be afraid of the Soviet Union, they are indebted to us, sell us cheap wheat for Italy and France, and they only take the Interior ministry behind the Velvet Curtain? Why they can't even fund Czech industry!"

Perhaps rather than failure of the State or State Apparatus, that that apparatus could be forced into a subservient position which assuages Winston even? (Yes, but he's our Bitch.)

I like this substitute, because it's another rarely before seen alternative path for the Cold War: that of the Soviets as junior partners to the WAllies. In fact, I haven't even seen it at all. At the risk of connecting everything to The Boss Baby, I must once again uphold @MisterP's Gone Horribly Right Central Powers Victory (the actual post-WWI map is here), which has the Trotsky's Soviet Union becoming a junior power to Germany, like so:

All business would basically be in Germans' hands. IRL Galicia was even given the option of joining Poland 1916 (though this would've been without the German annexations of northwestern Congress Poland). Belarus and Ukraine might even end up in a republican Intermarium if the Germans and Austrians can keep a lid on ethnic troubles; the Don and Kuban Cossacks would be independent within the sphere of influence. The Bolshies and Belkies could do what they wanted on their side of the border, and probably get guns 'n' training.

Would be interesting to see an equivalent post-WWII situation with the U.S. being the bear-baiter, a situation that's much more simpatico between Soviet and overseer. (Hey, maybe FDR lives to his full fourth term, too. And while we're imagining him healthy, why not go for a fifth term to oversee the creation of a new postwar internationalist order?)

 

[MisterP]

@Strategos' Risk also what I wrote (so so long ago) would fit the German-Russian relationship under Savinkov, Kerensky, or Cyril I

 

[Garrison]

The barely surviving USSR is the only practical path I can see. Damaged far worse than OTL, run off east of the Volga, and separatists governments survive to post war in the Baltics, Causcasus, Ukraine, etc...

And it basically means post war chaos. The Soviet population was going hungry IOTL, its going to be far worse here and there's probably outright civil war in various regions as well as massive numbers of refugees flowing west. The reconstruction of Europe is going to take far longer and I wonder how long the USA will be willing to fund an alt-Marshall Plan for?

 

[Beatriz]

Would the US find rationales to support dictators in the Third World like OTL’s Cold War?

 

[Garrison]

Would the US find rationales to support dictators in the Third World like OTL’s Cold War?

Well since those had to do with their economic interests as much as fighting the Cold War, yes.

 

[Julian]

One problem for the Soviet People (Soviet local Nomenklatura and their networks), is that the Communist Party and Soviet Union are the best way to organise their interests after the war. So much so that the only stable opposition was the Leningrad vibe for even more real communism please possibly found in Zhadanovishchina or in 56 or 68. Having the usefulness of the Communist Party controlled Soviet Union for the people with local economic power in the Soviet Union stably transmogrify is very very difficult indeed. Even in Ural scenarios I tout that the Reserve Leadership Centre, competiting with 3 other centres all arguing the same claim, would still be organising via the Stalinised methods of the 1920s party: they're more immediately available and useful, they appeal to the vigorous youth of the day who desire vigor in the 40s (and Brezhnev in their 40s).

I can't think of a way to get a Union of Russian Controlled States without an appalling post Ural civil war where sane Germany sets up nationalist-religious client after client in retreat. And we know how difficult a sane Germany retreating from the Urals in 1945 is, don't we?

yours,
Sam R.

An interesting POD might be that Stalin dies in Fall 1945, leading to Beria-Malenkov-Molotov running the show with Khrushchev-Zhdanov-Bulganin-Voznesensky-Mikoyan as very important players.

They pursue a neo-NEP, which was quite popular within the Soviet bureaucracy because it would make it much easier to tax all the small businesses which sprang up during the war (Julie Hessler has a good article on this). They also implement some basic agrarian reforms to improve incentives on collective farms, which avoids the worst of the ‘46-48 famine. While crop failures were unavoidable, better state policies could have avoided mass starvation.

The Gulag system remains in its reduced postwar state and doesn’t experience its late-40s expansion, which both Beria and Malenkov regarded as inefficient and counterproductive. The Special Meeting of the NKVD also has its powers reduced significantly, as Beria proposed in 1946.

This raises some interesting questions about how the new leadership clique manages labor discipline after the war, on the collective farm and to a lesser extent in industry. Stalin pursued mass incarceration as a solution, which like I said even Beria disagreed with (on practical rather than moral grounds).

The net result might be that the neo-NEP snowballs as the regime needs to placate workers with increased consumption and collective farmers with more financial incentives. Not a complete liberalization, but something akin to the 1920s with tight political controls but more room for economic debate and experimentation within the Party. The horizons for reform and liberalization were much broader in the immediate aftermath of the war than in 1953.

The central Soviet state was also much weaker compared to local Party leaders in 1945 than it was before the war or in 1953. Filip Slaveski’s Remaking Ukraine and Khlevniuk/Gorlizki’s Substate Dictatorship have nice discussions of this. Stalin’s death will only increase their power as the new leadership vies for their support.

A USSR much more occupied with internal power struggles and reconstruction might shy away from confrontation. Certainly you’ll still have communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, but you don’t get the forced Stalinization of the late-40s. Stalin was also a big impediment to the USSR’s integration into world trade and finance.

The USSR without Stalin postwar is more tumultuous but more prosperous.

 

[Sam R.]

A USSR much more occupied with internal power struggles and reconstruction might shy away from confrontation. Certainly you’ll still have communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, but you don’t get the forced Stalinization of the late-40s. Stalin was also a big impediment to the USSR’s integration into world trade and finance.

I found this post inspiring, but have only replied to the point where my inspiration has reading. The Rajk trials and purges seemed to be led off by a need conditioned by fear of the future war and development on Stalin's preferred model. Your suggestion is something more than the Communist Interior Ministry of the Intact Salami Government, but I think no slicing would be required in the people's democracies even in your suggestion. I had suggested upthread that destitution may make for a more internationally amenable Soviet Union for Winston and Our American Friends. Your suggestion of a verging to prosperity Soviet Union is even nicer. Successful development under a Leading Heights of Communism would lead to a less distrustful Soviet Union, and possibly to a less distrustful Britain. The People's Democracies still play a blunting echelon role, but aren't so critical to the predicted 1952 world war of our time line that sat in the back of the heads of local party figures. As such a war doesn't fit in the birth of the New Soviet Economy of freedom for Party capitalists within Party direction. The jolliest outcome imaginable is a much preferred speculation. With Red Russia interminably inwardly focused on its own development who wouldn't want a DDR camera, they're so cheap and well built, and holidaying there is like seeing old Europe.

yours,
Sam R.

 

[Julian]

I found this post inspiring, but have only replied to the point where my inspiration has reading. The Rajk trials and purges seemed to be led off by a need conditioned by fear of the future war and development on Stalin's preferred model. Your suggestion is something more than the Communist Interior Ministry of the Intact Salami Government, but I think no slicing would be required in the people's democracies even in your suggestion. I had suggested upthread that destitution may make for a more internationally amenable Soviet Union for Winston and Our American Friends. Your suggestion of a verging to prosperity Soviet Union is even nicer. Successful development under a Leading Heights of Communism would lead to a less distrustful Soviet Union, and possibly to a less distrustful Britain. The People's Democracies still play a blunting echelon role, but aren't so critical to the predicted 1952 world war of our time line that sat in the back of the heads of local party figures. As such a war doesn't fit in the birth of the New Soviet Economy of freedom for Party capitalists within Party direction. The jolliest outcome imaginable is a much preferred speculation. With Red Russia interminably inwardly focused on its own development who wouldn't want a DDR camera, they're so cheap and well built, and holidaying there is like seeing old Europe.

yours,
Sam R.

Yeah even OTL Atlee/Churchill were not fans of export controls directed at the USSR, because rebuilding trade with Eastern Europe would be a big economic boon! With an Eastern European Marshal Plan - Mikoyan and Molotov cared far more about getting dollars than enforcing economic subservience - and less military spending Western Europe rebuilds faster and, in turn, builds up enough dollars to compete with US economic dominance sooner. The USSR’s postwar “imperial scavenger” exploitation of Eastern Europe was broadly unpopular outside of Stalin, so the “people’s democracies” are less repressive and more prosperous as well. The USSR makes up for the lack of loot with a better domestic economy and more foreign trade.

I think revolutions in East Asia and decolonization make a Soviet bid for more global power by the late-50s inevitable. But it’ll be far less militarized/adventurist and more focused on selling the “non-capitalist path of development” to the newly independent nations. With the USSR wealthier, it’s a much more valuable patron!

 

[Julian]

The central Soviet state was also much weaker compared to local Party leaders in 1945 than it was before the war or in 1953. Filip Slaveski’s Remaking Ukraine and Khlevniuk/Gorlizki’s Substate Dictatorship have nice discussions of this. Stalin’s death will only increase their power as the new leadership vies for their support.

The potential political rowdiness in the Party might be comparable to 20s. Even with Stalin providing party First Secretaries in the regions with overwhelming support, Khlevniuk/Gorlizki found 46 attempted “electoral uprisings” against regional leaders.

Local leadership had been able to achieve considerable independence from Moscow’s oversight in ‘41-43, a situation which the Central Committee apparatus had only just begun to correct in ‘43-45. The regional party leadership was young and independent. But they were also authoritarian. Without Stalin’s support, regional competitors will be able to muster support to overthrow them. At the same time, they’ll lobby leaders in Moscow for support.

 

[Julian]

They pursue a neo-NEP, which was quite popular within the Soviet bureaucracy because it would make it much easier to tax all the small businesses which sprang up during the war (Julie Hessler has a good article on this). They also implement some basic agrarian reforms to improve incentives on collective farms, which avoids the worst of the ‘46-48 famine. While crop failures were unavoidable, better state policies could have avoided mass starvation.

...

This raises some interesting questions about how the new leadership clique manages labor discipline after the war, on the collective farm and to a lesser extent in industry. Stalin pursued mass incarceration as a solution, which like I said even Beria disagreed with (on practical rather than moral grounds).

The net result might be that the neo-NEP snowballs as the regime needs to placate workers with increased consumption and collective farmers with more financial incentives. Not a complete liberalization, but something akin to the 1920s with tight political controls but more room for economic debate and experimentation within the Party. The horizons for reform and liberalization were much broader in the immediate aftermath of the war than in 1953.

On this note, it's important to refer to the note of Deputy Prosecutor of the USSR G.N. Safonov to Stalin from '46 proposing to abolish the infamous '40 law on labor discipline and absenteeism. Citing the extreme disruptiveness of the law - over 15% of the workforce at some factories convicted - he suggested shifting to a system of fines and demotions for bad workplace behavior. This is one of numerous proposals which floated around in the Soviet bureaucracy suggesting ways that postwar society could be reformed. The primary goal of these proposals was to stimulate reconstruction and shore up popular support for the regime. As we now know, the core of the Stalinist leadership - Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, etc. - in '45-46 was supportive of these measures.

Agrarian reform is another interesting point. During the war, the importance of the private plots of collective farmers had grown dramatically at the expense of the collective farm. This was great for stimulating agricultural production, but Stalin was a hardliner on agriculture and in '45-46 pursued aggressive measures to restrict the "squandering" of collective farm property and land. The '45 post-Stalin leadership will likely wait to impose these restrictions until after recovery, in order to stimulate the rural economy.

At the same time you have the seizure of collective farm land by state enterprises, which widely appropriated abandoned or unused land during the war to feed their workforce. Part of the campaign against "squandering" was to get this land back, which local leaders fiercely resisted.

One of the big challenges of the post-Stalin state will be to navigate these pressures. The former enriches collective farms, the latter enriches workers and local leaders. The collective farm economy itself gets squeezed in the middle. One path might be to pursue agglomeration of small, weak collective farms into larger entities, which Khrushchev supported. This would be combined with increased rural investment - better purchase prices, electrification, etc. - to increase the appeal of collective farm work.

In the short term, however, the persistence of these issues is a net benefit for the regime as they provide a crucial social safety net for farmers (private plots) and workers (factory plots) during periods of crop failure, such as the '46-47 famine. I believe it's unlikely that the leadership attempts to imprudently undermine consumption as Stalin did until they feel the economy has sufficiently recovered.

 

[Seandineen]

The ongoing thread in Could the Western Bloc have gone authoritarian during the Cold War? made me think how the NATO states, especially America, were incredibly paranoid towards communism to the extent of keeping pet fascists in their pocket in case the reds ever got too far electorally speaking. (Also Operation Gladio, Paperclip, etc.) Now, certainly it would be interesting to imagine what if the Cold War was just somehow averted, which would require both the U.S. and Soviet leadership to just somehow decide to coexist, and I believe this has been theorized before.

But here's a more unusual idea I haven't really seen before except, oddly enough, in the late Stuart Slade's strategic bombing wankfest The Big One and the TBOverse: what if the Soviet system just up and died despite defeating the fascists in the process? What are the implications of the Cold War just imploding in the '40s and '50s? Yeah, communism wouldn't be completely gone, but it would be far less a bogeyman, and so perhaps U.S. society doesn't circle its ideological wagons and poison labor relations for all time.

Also, what do Dulles and all of the other interventionists and CIA covert ops guys do for the rest of the century? Does the U.S. continue FDR's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America, and never get to treating the rest of the world like how it historically treated LatAm, as it did in the Cold War?

I think so. The wildcard is China. Do the Helmsman and the Gitmo realise they are better off not tearing each other to pieces? Chou and the Young Marshall might persuade them to play nicer.

 

[John Waters]

Millions of people survive

 

[Beatriz]

Will the US
1) be less religious with Godless Reds being less lf a thing
2) be more internationally minded, with the knockoff effect of more tolerance for non-Jewish/Christian religions?

 

[John Waters]

The thing I hate USA and other NATO countries the most for is not bombing the soviet union into the ground while they still had the chance, sure there would've been casualties and life would suck at first but then there would've been a chance for some actual normal countries to rise out of it, kinda like in post-WW2 Germany

Also by 1940s, despite all the purging, the generation that still remembered the actual normal human life(meaning before 1917) was still alive and even made up the bulk of society, so it would've been far easier to build a normal society on that basis as opposed to in 1990s when that generation has already died out, and the bulk of the population spent their formative years in Stalin/Chruscev times(meaning no even the most basic understanding of how to handle money, how to work properly, no normal families, no communities, total crippling alcoholism etc.)

The soviet union was literally one of the worst things in all of history, MUCH worse than the nazis(who were themselves only a reaction to soviet communism anyway) even if only for unlike the nazis it was actually able to win it's wars spreading the plague further