I posted something quite like this a while ago:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/do-you-thi....html?t=159410
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Opinion: Leon Trotsky's USSR
Leon Trotsky was one of the major players contending for power after the big L's death, and he ultimately lost out to Stalin.
But let's play a thought experiment game here and say he became the leader of the USSR, with Stalin killed/exiled. Would he have been in a better position to lead the USSR against the Nazis and the opening years of the Cold War? Would he have handled the fascist threat better or worse?
I posted something quite like this a while ago:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/do-you-thi....html?t=159410
"All immediatists [. . .] want to get rid of society and put in its place a particular group of workers. This group they choose from the confines of one of the various prisons which constitute the bourgeois society of 'free men' i.e. the factory, the trade, the territorial or legal patch. Their entire miserable effort consists in telling the non-free, the non-citizens, the non-individuals [. . .] to envy and imitate their oppressors: be independent! free! be citizens! people! In a word: be bourgeois!" -Amadeo Bordiga, "Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism"
Trotsky urged the German Communists to form a temporary alliance with the Social Democrat workers to stop the fascists getting into power. Obviously if he was leader this would have been much more likely so he wouldnt have faced world war at all. The capitalist powers had a friendly alliance with Stalin up to 1947 when Truman got fed up of Stalin's failure to carry out his aim of establishing capitalist-communist coalitions in Eastern Europe with the aim of building capitalism. He also failed in China etc as well.
Trotsky would have been trying to spread world revolution so the capitalists would have been less friendly.
The Spanish revolution might have succeeded if Trotsky was leader of the USSR, and the French communists probably wouldn't have called off the 1936 general strike.
This is an utterly pointless thing to do. The Stalinist clique accepted many of the ideas of the left opposition such as industrialisation and so on. Maybe the USSR could have avoided war with the axis powers. Maybe the comitern would be more effective. Maybe they could have been better prepared with a better army and better supplied. Maybe quality of life would have been better in the 30s. Maybe communism wouldn't have such a bad name for itself. I know for one thing though, there'd still be a clique on the net who would support Stalin.
