If cold-war-hot tales count as alternate history, I'd say Team Yankee and Red Army are my favorite.
Is the latter the one where the Red Army actually wins?
Let’s go with Jonathan Edelstein’s Malê Rising, though I would note that the idealism and storylines of the last fifty years really started to get repetitive.
A deadly, viperish calm fell on Jeffrey's face. Measuring his words with venom, he said 'maybe that's why you've been a bus conductor all your life, John.'
The staff fell silent. Only the telly - Whistle Test, with John Peel - made a sound. Everyone looked at Jeffrey, feeling the contempt of his words, trying to wipe out the sleight of what he had said from their minds.
Thanks for the take on Lands of Red and Gold.Since I don't think it's SLP (correct me if I'm wrong) I'd say Lands of Red and Gold is probably my favorite right now.
Ruins of an American Party System is very good.
It does what I feel a lot of TLs struggle doing, which is self-justify itself with the events being plausible outcomes of the events within the TL, rather than the Rumsfeldia thing of stacking too high in one direction only to pull the rug out, or the more generic thing of converging with OTL too much because the author doesn't know where to go with their own project.Ruins of an American Party System is very good.
I can't remember the title but there was a short story by Turtledove that @Thande showed me if I remember correctly.
The premise was that Britain had fallen to the Nazis but a Fighting Britain had battled on beyond the seas. To no avail. The Teutonic war machine had crushed the Soviet Union and finally come marching over the Khyber Pass and captured the jewel of the old Empire's crown. And it was basically how does the Indian independence movement, revolving around Gandhi and the principle of nonviolent civil disobedience, deal with the British colonial government being replaced by a Nazi Reichskommissariat.
One of the things that I like about Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire is that the author acknowledges that the premise is implausible, and puts serious effort into justifying how it could have happened. The sequence of events still doesn't hold up great from a plausibility standpoint, but it's a lot better than the typical AH strategy of handwaving away implausibility.It's not my absolute favorite and it's not perfect, but I found Zhirinovksy's Russian Empire to be remarkably good at avoiding a lot of the pitfalls it could have stumbled into. It manages to avoid being too "boom boom goes the tank" and it uses the "vignette newspaper clipping" style in a way that actually flows pretty well.