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Best Post-Stalin Leader for the USSR?

Bomster

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So I’m imagining a world where the Soviet Union never fell, perhaps even achieved some semblance of economic prosperity which would prevent its fall. Who would be the best leader to succeed Stalin to achieve this? I originally thought extending Khrushchev’s reforms by having Nixon defeat Kennedy and avert the Cuban Missile Crisis would do this, but it seems Khrushchev did a lot of harm, perhaps more than good. Malenkov seems like an attractive pick but I don’t know how he would have retained power. Mikoyan seems very interesting but I don’t know how he would achieve power either. Overall who is the best leader for the USSR after Stalin, preferably a leader who focuses on improving the economy, consumer goods, and standards of living for citizens of the Soviet Union and eastern bloc?
 
Also none of this is an endorsement of any of these people or the Soviet Union itself. I’m just very interested in exploring a Soviet Union that actually worked.
 
Georgy Zhukov as the Centralising face of a Leningrad Clique dominated Soviet Union is probably best choice for a ‘cool Cold War, Soviet’s invest in infrastructure etc.’ Though also ‘Red Bonpartism’ etc.

The problem is that by this point the Soviet Union was essentially divided between different competing groups of Technocrats/engineers who thought they could solve the Soviet Union, this eventual descended into a collection of competing fiefdoms ran by former shoe factory workers and stuff.

This is where probably the best answer is, Stalin dies in 44’ or something and we Andrei Zhdanov doing his Doctrine/Cult of Personality figurehead stuff allowing for his followers in Leningrad to takeover upon his eventual death of alcoholism (probably after a purge/coup against one of the Old Bolsheviks) who plant a possible central leader in his place.
 
This discussion keeps coming up from time to time, and I think the position that I have landed in is that people tend to make the mistake of assuming that "if only the Soviet Union had had the right leader, then everything could have been made to work out". I would argue that in as far as the Soviet Union were concerned, the problems were fundamentally structural, and no single leader after Stalin, certainly not one who came from the Nomenklatura, ever held the power the be in a position to actually resolve them.

This is ironically a fairly Marxist view to take, which I note with some amusement. I'm a bit reminded of this sympathetic biographer of Trotsky's who at one point couldn't help but note the paradoxicality of how Trotsky in exile in Mexico managed to both hold the view that "everything that happens in history happens because of macro reasons, it's all down to material circumstances, there are no great men directing history, there are no crucial moments that defines everything that happens afterwards", and "if only things would have gone slightly different in the Politburo at some special dates in the 1920s, then Stalin wouldn't have taken power, the Soviet Union would not have become a degenerate worker's state, but instead a socialist utopia, if only I had been put in charge" at the same time.
 
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