Both countries had very large communist parties (in fact, the communist party was the largest party in France in 1945 and some French units were entirely made up of communists enlisted from the ranks of a resistance movement), totally Stalinist. Both countries would have devolved into civil war or something similar had the US gone to war against the Soviet Union. It would have had to pacify and occupy them, and suppress insurgency, in all likelihood.
Fuck! I once again answered to a zombie in which I had already posted several years ago :smack:
Fortunately, I didn’t contradict myself 
Assuming Hitler wasn’t genocidal in this hypothetical definitely yes. The USSR posed an existential threat to every other country in the world because its ideology explicitly called for World Revolution. But in our world, Hitler was definitely worse than Stalin because Hitler actually wanted to kill every Jew on Earth-Stalin while probably anti-Semitic did not, not to mention ethnically cleanse most of Eastern Europe.
So how harsh was the winter of '45-46 compared to earlier ones? I gotta see that as a factor.
The problem is that the russians just won’t die. You think you’ve buryied every last tracein the SDMB vauld and here we are again, I’d call it a zombie thread, but **communist android **is allready the accepted vernacular
I don’t know what you mean by “successfully”. Napoleon took Moscow.
How about zombies? Has a zombie army ever successfully taken Moscow?
As usual, logistics is an oft overlooked aspect of war. The economic, military, and supply situation of the USSR at this point in time was terrible. For starters, they had just annexed multiple countries with large veteran guerrilla movements and governments-in-exile to pacify; a task that was not accomplished without difficulty. Remember, many of the populations forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union both before and after the war were quite hostile to Moscow. During the early stages of Barbarossa the arrival of Axis forces was initially met with celebration in many such regions, such was their dislike of the Soviets. Quelling unrest will become a much greater task with the West assisting anti-Soviet insurgencies, and the bulk of the Red Army diverted to fighting the Western Allies in Central Europe. Supplies headed to the Red Army from the relocated industries of the USSR will have to travel through such territory, with losses and delays from partisan sabotage and devastation from the last few years of warfare.
Also, the USSR was on the brink of widespread starvation, and would be unable to obtain the massive amounts of food aid from the West as it did in our timeline. The continuing warfare wouldn’t allow Stalin to demobilize much of the military to aid the rebuilding of Russia, and when combined with the aforementioned insurgencies will make recovery from the devastation much more difficult. Without the flow of technical parts and machinery from the US that helped sustained the momentum of the Soviet offensive earlier in the war, a ton of armor and aircraft are going to be breaking down and running out of lubricants and spare parts. In regards to manpower, the USSR had reached the point of emptying prisons to fill the ranks.
Time is on the side of the Western Allies. They could sit back and spend a year building up forces to push into Eastern Europe, and in that time the Red Army would still be facing horrible logistics and mass starvation. And that isn’t even factoring in the atomic bomb, with which major portions of the leadership of the Politburo, NKVD, and military could be upset with a single strike.
My prediction would be a stalemate with massive casualties on both sides for months in the Fulda Gap, followed by a weakening of Soviet forces as the insurgencies, famine, and supply situation wear them down. A nuclear attack on Moscow would greatly disrupt the leadership and give opportunity for a long-awaited breakthrough by the Allies in Central Europe, after which a ceasefire is signed; with much of Eastern Europe being ceded in the process. However, the Western Allies pay dearly for it in blood and treasure.
The problem is that the russians just won’t die. You think you’ve buryied every last trace in the SDMB vauld and here we are again, I’d call it a zombie thread, but **communist android **is allready the accepted vernacular
And yet Saddam is still sitting there thumbing his nose at us. We really ought to do something about that!
Nazi racial ideas went a lot further than wanting to kill all the Jews. The reason for the war was the need of the German people to have lebensraum which would be found to the East. The Slavic people already living there were to be reduced to slavery - those not killed to make room for the Germans, that is. The second largest category of victims of the holocaust was Soviet POWs. If you only drop the anti-Semitism and keep the rest of the racial nonsense I can’t see the war being very different. If you drop all of the racial nonsense, there’s no reason for Germany to be invading the Soviet Union.
But that is ass-backwards.
As you said, the real reason was expansion to the east, the German equivalent of colonisation.
The the slavic racial nonsense was only to justify this colonialism. They were painted to be the ‘natives’ of germany’s ‘colonies’.
Hitler didn’t take over Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Yugoslavia because of jews.
So Germany would have fought the very same war it DID fight. If Hitler had ignored the jews the chief benefit would have been a saving of all the resources he wasted on collecting and killing them. Not enough to make a difference.
Now that’s weird, how did I get a double post an hour apart?
Piffle. The dream of world wide Marxism died with the ascent of Stalin to power and it was firmly buried with the murder of Trotsky. The Red Menace was simply a boogeyman that empowered Right Wing nutcases and authoritarian dictators until 1989.
The Soviet leadership may not have believed in Marxism but the Soviets certainly were looking to expand their power and influence and could use their ideology as part of it.
That is wildly different than “The USSR posed an existential threat to every other country in the world because its ideology explicitly called for World Revolution.”
This is the poorest thread I’ve ever seen on Straight Dope. Aside from the few people offering facts, most of you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Danimal, you don’t count in your last post as offering facts. Your data has little to do with the USSR’s warmaking potential when it finished off Nazi Germany from, say, Operation Bagration through the capture of Berlin.
nm
So? The American leadership was looking to expand its power and influence and wanted to convert other countries to its ideology of democracy and free market capitalism. Let both ideologies present their case and let the better ideology win (spoiler alert: it was ours).
We’d have been a lot better off if we hadn’t developed this stupid idea that we were at war with “communism”. We weren’t at war with communism any more than we had been at war with fascism or socialism or imperialism or monarchism or mercantilism. In 1941, Nazism didn’t declare war on us - Germany did. In 2001, Islam didn’t attack us - Al Qaeda did. And during the cold war, we should have focused on the country that opposed us - the Soviet Union - and not the ideology that country held.