We’ve discussed the war itself, but what would be the aftermath of a conventional Warsaw Pact victory in the early eighties?
For the purposes of the debate. Casualties were relatively light on both sides, and all of continental Western Europe is occupied but not Great Britain or Ireland. There was very little collateral damage in the Eastern bloc, and moderate damage to the conquered countries （think WWII Britain). Switzerland and Yugoslavia currently remain unoccupied due to their neutrality.
Are we supposed to imagine that all French nuclear weapons malfunctioned?:eek::rolleyes:
Reagan and Thatcher aren’t reelected?
I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but the scenario you are positing is an extremely unlikely one. Even assuming French neutrality to side-step their own nuclear arsenal, it is very hard to realistically posit a WW3 where things have gone that one sided and the losing side hasn’t reached for their ability to completely annihilate the “winning” side. Even a long term stalemate without either side escalating to breach what is in the end the artificial barrier between conventional and nuclear warfare is hard to realistically imagine.
Even accepting the OP at face value, I’m having trouble picturing the Soviets occupying that much territory. It seems to me that would have been a serious economic drain on them. And I doubt that a strategy of proxy communist regimes would have worked in a number of countries, particularly those with either a history of resistance movements or those which had a lot of hard-core anti-communists running around.
Let’s assume the war happened in the late fifties before France had nuclear weapons.
I figure you’d pretty much have western Europe going the way eastern Europe went historically. The Soviets had an advantage in that communism gave them a ready means for taking over a country. They would just declare that they had only been opposed to the fascist/reactionary/imperialist regime that was running the country; they had no argument with the people. They were even able to apply this to Germany by declaring they were opposed to the Hitlerites not the German people.
So the Soviet Union would take over and find some local communists who were willing to set up a collaborationist government. The locals would be happy because they at least nominally have their own government (as long as that government stayed within certain limits). The Soviets would be happy because this would lower their need to maintain huge garrisons while having a satellite empire that did what it was told on all the important issues.
I think a proxy/affiliated government is problematic in France. Yeah, they had a not-insignificant marxist movement, and that could have been used to form the government. But they also had a resistance movement during WWII, and if we’re setting this in the 50s, it seems to me that it wouldn’t be that hard to boot it up again. The same is true for the Greeks. And insurgencies mean that the Soviets have to commit large garrisons.
As for the Turks, I have trouble believing a communist government would last more than five minutes before being booted, without a constant Soviet troop presence. Of course, they’d probably opt to have a heavy presence in Turkey anyway, just to protect Soviet borders.
The Chronosphere is destroyed, Josef Stalin is mysteriously assassinated. The Brother of Nod will…tire…of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
The OP states mid eighties.
Massive purges of “capitalists”, priests, “traitors to the proletariat”, and more such excuses for using terror to brutalize a people into submission to their violet oppressors.
My question is how do these hypotheticals, of which there have been several recently, pass as questions for which there is a factual answer. There is a factual answer to these questions?
Once the execution of priests starts, the Italians and probably the Austrians go into full-scale insurgency, to join the French, the Greeks and the Turks. But post-Stalin, the Soviets tended to co-opt churches, rather than purging them, so I don’t see them rounding up priests en-masse. I’d guess they wouldn’t even try to enter Vatican City.
This should really go to GD or IMHO.
It’s kind of a silly question- the entire Soviet build-up in Eastern Europe and the existence of the Warsaw Pact were entirely intended as a defensive buffer to what they saw as a threat from the Western nations.
Keep in mind, their entire mentality was colored by their WWII experiences where they were invaded and suffered grievous destruction and horrible loss of life at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Combine that with the Western government propaganda and misinterpretation of the forces buildup and conflating it with other aggressive sounding Communist propaganda, and you got a situation where both sides were terrified that the other would actually attack at some point.
I oppress thee!
Not “o”, merely “de”, but keep trying. :)
The French Resistance was heavily communist in WWII, and was minor compared to the Polish Resistance, which the Soviets crushed with little difficulty after 1945. They might tie up a division or two until they were eliminated but I doubt they’d be able to through off a Communist regime with substantial Soviet support. At teh very most you might see something like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
I’m impressed.
Operation Gladio:
Not “im”, merely “op”, but keep trying. 