Stephen Kotkin in his recent first volume of a projected three-volume biography of Stalin, discusses what if Stalin had died before he achieved power (or at least full power):
"But what if Stalin had died?31 He had come down with a serious case of appendicitis in 1921, requiring surgery. “It was difficult to guarantee the outcome,” Dr. V. N. Rozanov recalled. “Lenin in the morning and in the evening called me in the hospital. He not only inquired about Stalin’s health, but demanded the most thorough report.”32 Stalin had complained of pain, despite a local anesthetic, and Rozanov administered a heavy dose of chloroform, the kind of heavy dose he would administer to Frunze in 1925, who died not long after his own operation.33 Stalin, who may have also suffered ulcers (possibly attributive to typhus), following his own operation had taken a rest cure—ordered by the politburo—at Nalchik in the North Caucasus from May through August 1921.34 In December 1921, he was again incapacitated by illness.35
"Later, Kremlin doctors recorded that Stalin had suffered malaria at some point in his youth. In 1909, in exile, he had a bout of typhus in the Vyatka hospital, a relapse because he had suffered it in childhood. Stalin’s elder second brother Giorgy, whom he never knew, had died of typhus. In 1915, in Siberian exile, Stalin contracted rheumatism, which periodically flared, accompanied by quinsy and flu.36 Stalin also suffered tuberculosis prior to the revolution. His first wife, Kato, died of tuberculosis or typhus. Yakov Sverdlov, with whom Stalin bunked in a single room in Siberian exile, had tuberculosis, and Stalin moved out. Sverdlov appears to have died of TB in 1919. Tuberculosis might have killed off Stalin as well..
"If Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization—the only kind—would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high. “More than almost any other great man in history,” wrote the historian E. H. Carr, “Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances.”43 Utterly, eternally wrong. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism. This required extraordinary maneuvering, browbeating, and violence on his part. It also required deep conviction that it had to be done. Stalin was uncommonly skillful in building an awesome personal dictatorship, but also a bungler, getting fascism wrong, stumbling in foreign policy. But he had will. He went to Siberia in January 1928 and did not look back. History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up."
Stalin, Volume 1 - Kotkin Stephen - страница 126 - чтение книги бесплатно
You know, I think that it's a huge shame that he lived until 1934 and not died a couple years or more earlier. Hugo Eckener would have been much better at dealing with Hitler. He, unlike Hindenburg, was much more passionate about his opposition to Nazism, after all.