Impossible because of Hitlers plans in the east.
It’s starting to sound like a non communist Russia would be as big a problem as any other - a weak republic, shattered by being involved with the 1930s depression, split down ethnic lines, absorbing eugenic ideas from the US and Britain, along with similar business deals with the corporations. In a land where an oppressed peasantry was either a very recent memory or a current reality eugenics would be super attractive ideology for the upper classes. Add a potent dose of anti-Jewish feeling.
If Russia had become fascist would the Germans regard the slavs as untermenschen, or as fellow travellers in fascism like the Italians ?
A large part of the those plans was the destruction of Communism. That wasn’t the only reason he invaded Russia, but without that impetus I can’t see Hitler opening a second front (something that German military planners feared since the planning for WW1). There was plenty of Lebensraum in East Europe without invading an ally (and actual aly as opposed to a partner of convenience as Soviet Russia was in real-life 1941).
And so the front would have been to the north - Britain and Scandinavia. I think maybe a deal with Russia taking East Europe and Germany taking Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia. Japan could have received support in the East from Russia. The oil fields along it’s southern flank would have been uncontested, with possible excursions down into the Middle East.
So I think we can all agree that communism saved the world from fascist annihilation at the hands of a German/Russian/Japanese Axis.
Good, that wasn’t too hard.
No the communist regime, and Stalin in particular, screwed everything up so badly that the Nazis came very close to winning the war, which would have been a catastrophic for the world.
The incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people ultimately prevented that happening at the cost of millions of lives. The Russians won on the eastern front DESPITE the communist regime not because of it.
Just as in the First World War, keep throwing bodies at the problem.
Yeah, it was definitely a bug, not a feature. Also, I didn’t get the ‘German/Russian/Japanese Axis’…I figured it was some sort of tongue in cheek comment, though maybe the poster didn’t realize that Russia wasn’t part of the Axis during WWII. I’d say that it was those damned Capitalists who saved the Communists and the world by providing all of the goodies the Red Army needed to fight off the Germans (as well as providing a not unsubstantial military factor as well). It was, in the end, a joint effort, with each of the major allies and even some of the smaller allies being necessary to get the end result. It wasn’t the US who won the war, or the USSR or the UK…it was all of them together, combined with the other allies that made an unbeatable combination. Take out any of the major allies and you get different results.
It’s doubtful Russia would have entered an alliance with Germany if it hadn’t been a communist country. Postwar Germany and the Soviet Union were the two major outsider states of Europe after 1918 and that gave them some common interests even if they were ideological enemies. If Russia had retained an imperial or republican government, there would have been no reason it wouldn’t have maintained its wartime association with France and Britain.
So Germany would have been facing the same strategic situation in 1939 that it had in 1914 - allies on both sides of it. Hitler, who couldn’t resist going to war, would have almost certainly ignored this threat and still invaded Poland. And that would have brought France, Britain, and Russia into the war in this alternate reality. So a war between Germany and a non-communist Russia probably would have begun earlier than 1941 rather than later.
They weren’t even, not in the early 30s - the Weimar Republic was pretty bolsho’ in many respects - that’s actually why many supported Hitler. Notably the Junkers of east Germany who, if they wouldn’t have taken off their gloves to shake Hitler’s hand, still saw him as better than all them Reds and Republicans coming for their pwecious land trusts and their petty little privileges.
Right, but in this alternative universe there might not have been (almost certainly wouldn’t have been) any bolshevik movement in Germany at all, since it wouldn’t have happened in Russia. Certainly Hitler et al couldn’t have played on the fears of Germans wrt a red Communist Russia, which would have taken a lot of steam out of the Nazi movement wrt connection to the majority of Germans. It’s possible that instead of a Nazi party you would instead have had some sort of left wing movement that wouldn’t have co-opted the WR but instead been able to work through it to gain election seats and form their own government within that structure.
I believe, though, that the “Russian steamroller” lost the most lives, which made the USSR think that it did all the heavy lifting.
Yeah but you’re supposed to be chewing over what would happen without the communist bit…that was…the…point :smack:
The whole “what if” hypothetical about what kind of regime would replace the tzars if the Bolshevik revolution had failed is irrelevant. The fact is the actual real life communist regime, and Stalin specifically, consistently screwed up the German invasion and the lead up to it across the board. The only reason that did not lead to German victory was the incredible sacrifice of the soviet people.
Basically Stalin doomed several massive armies with his incompetence over the course of the war, despite the bravery of the troops he was sending to their deaths (and as a reward to the handful of who survived the resulting captivity they were sent to gulags).
The whole soviet system was part of the problem, and one of the things Stalin did right was to relax the political restrictions the communist hierarchy was imposing on the red army.
It’s totally relevant in a thread started with “**A non-Communist Russian Empire and WW2”
In fact it’s the only thing that CAN be relevant :(:(:(:(:(
**Just because your terrified that someone might forget to hate communists for a couple of seconds doesn’t mean you can redefine the OP.
The hypothetical “what ifs” regarding which direction an alternative universe russia would have gone if the bolshevik revolution failed are interesting intellectual distractions, but meaningless historically. Maybe they’d have a strong democratic government, or maybe they’d have a Russian Hitler in 1940, on the other hand maybe they’d be ruled by super-intelligent lizards.
None of that changes the fact that the communist system very nearly doomed russia to defeat, and doomed millions of soviet citizens to a terrible death.
The OP said:
The “political education and direction” the communist system was not the reason the soviet union won the war on the Eastern front, it was one of the reasons the soviet union came VERY close on more than one occasion to losing the war on the eastern front.
One of the few good decisions Stalin made (later in the war, after he had already nearly lost the war, and sent untold thousands of his people to their deaths) was to relax that political and ideological control of the armed forces. That was one of the reasons for the success of the soviet armies later in the war.
Which is why I answered the OP in my first few posts in this thread. The discussion, however, has moved on from then to other things, which is why I posted on that subject later. Seriously, I’m not sure what you expect from this. Most people answered the OP on the first page, but it’s all speculation. You were the one who seemed to want to be making some hijacking point about the superiority of the communists or something in the thread that’s supposedly about a ‘non-Communist Russian Empire and WW2’…and then get bent out of shape when people respond to that hijack or change in topic. Do you only want to discuss changes in topic when people say what you want to hear, or only YOU can change the topic to hijack the discussion onto other paths?
In a total war, the ability to manufacture weapons on a huge scale in paramount, and the Soviet manufacturing capacities greatly expanded during the 1930s, from about 4.3% of the world to 18.5% in 1936 - 1938. Both Germany and the USSR had roughly the same military industrial capacity in 1937.
Had Hitler rose to power even without the presence of the USSR (which is not a given, and possibly not likely as others have pointed out), the lower industrial capacity would have doomed the Soviets.
I beg your pardon?
The tsars were stuck in an Ancien Régime way of thinking - in which agriculture is the source of all wealth and power. To be fair, that was also the case in Western countries in the early XXth, but then they had parliaments and so forth to force the gentry into getting with the program over time. No such luck in Russia, where the tsars were absolute (and pretty harsh) autocrats.
The communists, for their part, were heavy into industry (and Stalin himself had a bug up his arse about catching up with Great Britain’s production of steel for some reason) and modernization - be it in terms of railways, electricity, mechanization of labour and so forth.
So **TokyoBayer **is probably right that the political shift helped Russia weather German aggression, which might not have been the case with tsars still in power.