Well I did a TL, called
Red Fury where Stalin took over instead of Trotsky do. His purge of senior party members in 30s, eventually takes its toll in 70s and 80s, despite a reformer becomes general secretary, the damage was Irreversible, and USSR breaks up.
I really thought you had Lenin well pegged in that TL. The man was an utter snake who would do anything and say anything to get power.
It got a bit silly from the 30s on though. Especially the way you had that Hitler guy turn Germany into a Randian horror that crippled its own atom bomb research because one of the most tolerant countries in Europe suddenly can't handle that their best scientists were Jews. I get that the Leninist Soviet Union you were showing needed the Germans to be well beaten with an idiot stick to have a chance of emerging from the war as a remotely credible threat to the US, but it just was stacking the deck too heavily to get a particular outcome in my view.
Well firstly, let's go by the assumption that Lenin and Martov, for whatever reason, failed to bury the hatchet like they did prior to the February Revolution
Honestly, if Lenin had arrived in Russia a year earlier, before the elections and the peaceful transition to government by the Soviets had made Lenin's cuckoo ideas clearly cuckoo, I can see Lenin whipping up the Bolsheviks into launching a coup, regardless being on relatively good terms with Martov at the time. Lenin was always fixated on the idea that the revolution wouldn't be secure until violence had secured total power for the Vangardists. And the Mensheviks weren't Vangardists.
I suppose that whack job Stalin could have taken over, assuming he wouldn't just fuck everything up. A guy like him just wouldn't have enough support - he talked about "purging" this and that and he would have fucked up sooner or later and toppled all the dominoes. That or he wouldn't have kept enough around smart people and the dipshits left would have let the Nazis run over them.
I think you are doing a disservice to Stalin here - people remember him for his radical speeches in the 30s, but those speeches were made in the face of the coups of the 30s, the rising threat of Ludendorfist Germany and a severe famine in the Ukraine where corruption of the SRs and Anarchists who dominated Ukrainian politics appeared to be a significant factor in the suffering there. And to be honest, he was mostly right. The Ludendorf regime
was a threat to the country, and if the Soviets had taken action when he started speaking in favour of a crash industrialization action, much bloodshed might have been saved. The coups attempts
did end after Trotsky purged the army of Tsarist era officers. Probably the only thing he was really wrong about was what was going on in the Ukraine, where modern historians agree that political corruption was really not as big a factor as it seemed at the time, but Stalin was far from the only politician in the Soviet Union who believed that the Anarchists and right-SRs were betraying the Revolution and behaving like two-bit Tsarist idiots.
Also, he was key to keeping Lenin out of power in 1919 by (along with Kamenev and Muranov) building a real alliance between the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs. (Well, a full on merger in the case of the Mensheviks, until the great depression threw the country into chaos.) And as you may already have gathered, I have a poor opinion on Lenin.
no unified Socialist Korea
The Soviets went through the Japanese like a sledge hammer through wet paper. Even a SU that was a one party Leninist hellhole is going to be able to take the whole Korean peninsula as they did OTL. The reason why the peninsula was divided was a nice gesture to the Americans. So depending on how the one party alt-SU sees America, they might keep all of Korea. Of course, it would be a one party Vangardist Korea, but whatever you say about Vangardism, it is a sort of socialism.
fasquardon
