raharris1973
Well-known member
What if Stalin's mind, from August 1938, self-inserts, into his mind and body of January 1926?
Stalin, as of August 1938, has multiple achievements under his belt, and multiple concerns. He has rapidly constructed Socialism by implementing two Five-Year plans of collectivization and heavy industrialization and military build-up.
Unfortunately, class conflict has intensified, not lessened, with the construction of socialism, it's been necessary to purge the party and even the military with the discovery of bourgeois-Trotskyist-Fascist wreckers aligned outside Fascist powers like Germany and Japan found in the most unlikely of places. Comrade Yezhov is uprooting wreckers and traitors everywhere, and comrades who'd long been seen as coming around to the right line or even had sterling ideological pedigrees were confessing involvement in all sorts of traitorous designs.
The international environment was no less threatening. Stalin was using Soviet and international "volunteers" to support the Spanish Republic's war effort and try to corral its loose factions to resist and overcome Italian and German backed Spanish right-wing Nationalists. The Hitler regime was unremittingly anti-Soviet, had swallowed Austria whole without firing a shot in March 1938, and since May had been threatening Czechoslovakia, the only Central European state that the USSR had primarily positive relations with.
In Asia, Japanese forces were clashing with Soviet forces along Lake Khasan around the Soviet-Korean-Manchurian border. Japan was also engaged in a brutal war of conquest against China, and the Soviet Union, while limiting its direct combat involvement, was supplying the Chinese United Front of Nationalists and Communists with arms, advisors, financing, and volunteers pilots in its fight against Japan.
Foreknowledge of all these achievements, policies, and dangers is there in Stalin's consciousness as it goes back in time to January 1926.
In January 1926, the Soviet Union is still using the New Economic Policy, a partial retreat to capitalism, to finish recovery from WWI, the Civil War and famine year. It has reached a good stride and gotten a long way to recovering output to 1913 levels, but it is getting difficult to motivate the agriculture sector to produce more for the urban working class, and urban enterprises are not producing much that agricultural producers are interested, or that builds the industrial capital base of the country. Internationally, Moscow controls foreign Communist parties through the COMINTERN, but attempts at revolution throughout European countries have been a bust. Japan in 1925 vacated northern Sakhalin, returning it to Soviet sovereign control, and resuming trade. Relations with Britain, earlier reestablished, had been broken in the aftermath of the Zinoviev letter affair. The USSR at this moment had no diplomatic relations with the United States, but decent diplomatic relations with Weimar Germany and secret military cooperation.
In China, the USSR and COMINTERN was putting its primary support behind the Guomindang-Communist Party United Front based in the far southern city of Guangzhou in Guangdong province (also allied ideologically with Guangxi landlords) and the parties had chapters in other Chinese cities. The USSR also had some ties to other Chinese warlords like the northwestern "Christian General" Feng Hsu-Yiang.
Stalin, "Comrade card-file" at this time was supporting the NEP policy against Left Communist challenges.
How does Stalin proceed, now that he has foreknowledge of the next dozen years and all its desired and undesired elements?
For example, does he end the NEP a year or two early and corresponding launch the 5 year planning and collectivization processes earlier? The temptation to do so is to speed up capital development. The potential disadvantage in doing so is that the imported western expertise and machinery he used for much of OTL's first 5 year plan will not be as cheap on the world market if he starts earlier, in prosperous years like 1926 or 1927.
Likewise, is Collectivization run any smarter, better, less wastefully? Not necessarily out of any kind-heartedness but out of practical efficiency. Perhaps ways are found to deceive more people into selling their livestock for scrip of perceived value, or state cattle rustling before slaughter is more efficient? Perhaps emergency food distribution is better prepared, and certainly weather conditions.
On a very ugly side, the combined 1938/1926 Stalin will now be seeing or hearing about daily hundreds of people he came to regard as traitors, so he'll instinctively want to speed these people's demise. But in 1926, he doesn't have absolute power to make this happened, and if he moves too fast or crudely, he risks a counter-reaction that jeopardizes himself.
In world affairs, he knows that things are ready to go from seemingly promising to bad to worse over the next five years in East Asia, with Chiang Kai-shek screwing over and then massacring the Chinese Communist Party in 1926-1927, Zhang Xueliang challenging the Soviet hold on the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929, and then the Japanese military going batshit insane aggressive on the Asian mainland from 1931 onward. How might Stalin try to act to head off any or all of these negative developments.
In Europe, he knows the Depression is coming, but that it turned out to be a threat, driving the rise of Nazi Germany and spread of Fascism, not an opportunity for Communism. What will he do to discourage and or prepare for the rise of Hitler? To head off the Spanish coup and Civil War? Etc.
Stalin, as of August 1938, has multiple achievements under his belt, and multiple concerns. He has rapidly constructed Socialism by implementing two Five-Year plans of collectivization and heavy industrialization and military build-up.
Unfortunately, class conflict has intensified, not lessened, with the construction of socialism, it's been necessary to purge the party and even the military with the discovery of bourgeois-Trotskyist-Fascist wreckers aligned outside Fascist powers like Germany and Japan found in the most unlikely of places. Comrade Yezhov is uprooting wreckers and traitors everywhere, and comrades who'd long been seen as coming around to the right line or even had sterling ideological pedigrees were confessing involvement in all sorts of traitorous designs.
The international environment was no less threatening. Stalin was using Soviet and international "volunteers" to support the Spanish Republic's war effort and try to corral its loose factions to resist and overcome Italian and German backed Spanish right-wing Nationalists. The Hitler regime was unremittingly anti-Soviet, had swallowed Austria whole without firing a shot in March 1938, and since May had been threatening Czechoslovakia, the only Central European state that the USSR had primarily positive relations with.
In Asia, Japanese forces were clashing with Soviet forces along Lake Khasan around the Soviet-Korean-Manchurian border. Japan was also engaged in a brutal war of conquest against China, and the Soviet Union, while limiting its direct combat involvement, was supplying the Chinese United Front of Nationalists and Communists with arms, advisors, financing, and volunteers pilots in its fight against Japan.
Foreknowledge of all these achievements, policies, and dangers is there in Stalin's consciousness as it goes back in time to January 1926.
In January 1926, the Soviet Union is still using the New Economic Policy, a partial retreat to capitalism, to finish recovery from WWI, the Civil War and famine year. It has reached a good stride and gotten a long way to recovering output to 1913 levels, but it is getting difficult to motivate the agriculture sector to produce more for the urban working class, and urban enterprises are not producing much that agricultural producers are interested, or that builds the industrial capital base of the country. Internationally, Moscow controls foreign Communist parties through the COMINTERN, but attempts at revolution throughout European countries have been a bust. Japan in 1925 vacated northern Sakhalin, returning it to Soviet sovereign control, and resuming trade. Relations with Britain, earlier reestablished, had been broken in the aftermath of the Zinoviev letter affair. The USSR at this moment had no diplomatic relations with the United States, but decent diplomatic relations with Weimar Germany and secret military cooperation.
In China, the USSR and COMINTERN was putting its primary support behind the Guomindang-Communist Party United Front based in the far southern city of Guangzhou in Guangdong province (also allied ideologically with Guangxi landlords) and the parties had chapters in other Chinese cities. The USSR also had some ties to other Chinese warlords like the northwestern "Christian General" Feng Hsu-Yiang.
Stalin, "Comrade card-file" at this time was supporting the NEP policy against Left Communist challenges.
How does Stalin proceed, now that he has foreknowledge of the next dozen years and all its desired and undesired elements?
For example, does he end the NEP a year or two early and corresponding launch the 5 year planning and collectivization processes earlier? The temptation to do so is to speed up capital development. The potential disadvantage in doing so is that the imported western expertise and machinery he used for much of OTL's first 5 year plan will not be as cheap on the world market if he starts earlier, in prosperous years like 1926 or 1927.
Likewise, is Collectivization run any smarter, better, less wastefully? Not necessarily out of any kind-heartedness but out of practical efficiency. Perhaps ways are found to deceive more people into selling their livestock for scrip of perceived value, or state cattle rustling before slaughter is more efficient? Perhaps emergency food distribution is better prepared, and certainly weather conditions.
On a very ugly side, the combined 1938/1926 Stalin will now be seeing or hearing about daily hundreds of people he came to regard as traitors, so he'll instinctively want to speed these people's demise. But in 1926, he doesn't have absolute power to make this happened, and if he moves too fast or crudely, he risks a counter-reaction that jeopardizes himself.
In world affairs, he knows that things are ready to go from seemingly promising to bad to worse over the next five years in East Asia, with Chiang Kai-shek screwing over and then massacring the Chinese Communist Party in 1926-1927, Zhang Xueliang challenging the Soviet hold on the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929, and then the Japanese military going batshit insane aggressive on the Asian mainland from 1931 onward. How might Stalin try to act to head off any or all of these negative developments.
In Europe, he knows the Depression is coming, but that it turned out to be a threat, driving the rise of Nazi Germany and spread of Fascism, not an opportunity for Communism. What will he do to discourage and or prepare for the rise of Hitler? To head off the Spanish coup and Civil War? Etc.
