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WI: A Stalin-less USSR?

Hendryk

Taken back control yet?
Published by SLP
Location
France
A recurring question in the AH community involves a Hitler-less Third Reich. Much less often does one come across speculation about a Stalin-less USSR. So, let's say that Stalin dies in August 1920 while fighting Polish forces at Lvov, and remains a footnote in the history of the Bolshevik revolution. How do you see things proceeding from there? Who gets to emerge victorious from the factional struggles that followed Lenin's death? Which policies are implemented in the agricultural and industrial sectors from the late 1920s?
 
It's really across the Civil War that so many of the organisational structures within the Bolshevik/Communist Party and the state were established and gave Stalin the institutional clout to gather so much power. The Orgburo was established in 1919 and the Uchraspred in 1920 and Stalin was a central figure in these institutions becoming in charge of both of these by 1922 and then the General Secretariat as whole. They allowed him to reassign party members to different regions of the country (his allies to the centres of power in Leningrad and Moscow, his enemies to Ukraine or Siberia, sometimes Turkmenistan for example) and fill party conferences and congresses with those who followed his interpretation of the party-line and although he didn't have total power nonetheless he created institutional trends and created allies that relied upon his organisational position that later supported his control of power.

Stalin getting killed in 1920 has the potential to alter the very institutional fabric of the Party but, with the material conditions as they were, there is still this inevitable bureaucratisation of the entire state, often considered an unfortunate necessity in the face of civil war and economic destruction, that worked against any nascent democratic organs and methods of change. So with this in mind, him getting killed early could either massively change the direction of the Soviet state or inevitably the pressures that were being faced would have developed into something recognisable as what we understand as "Stalinism" regardless. Some formative moments in this era would be the debate on trade unions and the debate on party factionalism. Stalin importantly backed Lenin up but I don't think he was so integral to Lenin's victories in the discussion in the Party that Lenin's arguments wouldn't have still found root. However, because of the arguments Lenin was frustrated by those who backed Trotsky or the Workers' Opposition and so you saw the likes of Krestinsky, an important organisational figure in his own right, getting removed and Stalin gaining more prominence.

Essentially, Lenin would miss Stalin's organisational ability to rally the membership to Lenin's perspective much as Sverdlov had been able to do. Who replaces him in this period? Due to his arguments with Trotsky in the period, Lenin wrote up the slate (slate elections for the CC were another invention of the civil war, interestingly enough) to replace Trotsky's supporters, such as Krestinsky, with those he felt were more reliable, figures close to Stalin such as Molotov. Without Stalin, it is entirely possible that some of these figures wouldn't have even been considered by Lenin but certainly he would have looked to replace Trotsky's supporters to shore up his own power and Molotov himself was known by Lenin for his organisational ability if not as respected because of his lack of developed political knowledge. As a result whilst Molotov would be in prime position to take over much of Stalin's institutional control, he lacked any deep respect within the party and it's doubtful he would have accumulated the sort of individual power that Stalin eventually gained. Who knows, basically. You could see it develop in a variety of ways without Stalin. Potentially with Lenin's eventual death you see someone like Bukharin, a party darling and well liked amongst many factions, coming to power backed by the institutional support of Molotov but it could swing in many directions.

Economically, one thing was for certain: War Communism was a phase that contained within it as many hopeful, desperate, utopian attempts at fashioning socialism from broken ruins as it contained ad-hoc, temporary patches to a broken economy, along with the more well-known brutal exploitation of the countryside to give the cities and the Red Army a lifeline. It would definitely be replaced by the New Economic Programme, if only to offer some modicum of stability. The NEP had its own deep-seated problems, furthering bureaucratisation, stratifying the countryside between the rich land owning peasantry that employed wage workers and the much poorer peasants, the "scissors crisis" where prices for industrial commodities outstripped the prices for agricultural commodities, etc. Without Stalin opportunistically backing the Right of the Party and the NEP in an attempt to diminish the Left Opposition and then swinging around abruptly to collectivisation to diminish the Right, you could see a slower and more careful development out of the NEP towards some sort of collectivisation, as the Left Opposition argued, but alternatively if someone like Bukharin more prominent in power you could see an adaption and continuation of the NEP.

Ultimately, I definitely try not to hold to "Great Man" theories of history but if there was one figure whose institutional power had such huge overriding influence, then it is Stalin. Without him, potentially the Soviet Union would have been a very different place indeed.
 
Hmm, well one factor maybe that the Soviet Union doesn’t make Homosexuality illegal after the brief period it had been legalised under Lenin. A lot of it’s reason for it being made a illegal probably has to do with Stalin pandering to the more Conservative elements of the party as well as it being a good tool to arrest potential subversives with.

So maybe with no Stalin the Soviet Union is considered a Haven for the LGBT movement which skews how Western Democracies react to Homosexuality even more.
 
Hmm, well one factor maybe that the Soviet Union doesn’t make Homosexuality illegal after the brief period it had been legalised under Lenin. A lot of it’s reason for it being made a illegal probably has to do with Stalin pandering to the more Conservative elements of the party as well as it being a good tool to arrest potential subversives with.

So maybe with no Stalin the Soviet Union is considered a Haven for the LGBT movement which skews how Western Democracies react to Homosexuality even more.
Interestingly, the World League for Sexual Reform had originally intended to hold a conference in Moscow in 1932, but Soviet disapproval led to its being held in Brno instead.

On a related note, I wonder whether, without Stalin imposing his conservative views on architecture, Constructivism might have remained the dominant style in the USSR throughout the middle decades of the 20th century.
 
On a related note, I wonder whether, without Stalin imposing his conservative views on architecture, Constructivism might have remained the dominant style in the USSR throughout the middle decades of the 20th century.

Quite possibly, although even looking at the examples from the 20s it seems that it was evolving in a very parallel direction to the Art Deco-> Modernist school.
 
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