Beria rules cccp

[Samof94]

What happens if he takes over after Lenin dies or if Stalin dies early??? This man was widely considered to be quite dangerous.

[Cassius]

Beria is an interesting character because, whilst he was clearly an extremely vicious individual who was responsible for many deaths, it suited the rest of the CCCP leadership to foist all of the blame for the excesses of the Stalin era onto him (until Khrushchev broke with Molotov, Kaganovich et al and denounced Stalin). All of the major CCCP leaders committed their own atrocities, but Beria was vulnerable to scapegoating after Stalin’s death because of his poor relations with the rest of the Politburo, his lack of respect for Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and his own particular peccadilloes.

It’s difficult to say whether the Soviet Union would have gone in a different direction under Beria; he was, as mentioned above, known to be particularly disinterested in orthodox Marxism-Leninism (after all, he was not an Old Bolshevik and joined the party mainly for opportunistic reasons in the 1920’s) and seems to have wanted to relax state planning to a degree. On the other hand, he didn’t have a strong power base within the party, so it’s unlikely that he would have been able to overcome the opposition of the rest of the Politburo to any significant political and economic reform (as Khrushchev was to find out eleven years later).

[PSOL]

There most likely would have been a coup or revolution in the USSR, Beria was not liked at all.

[FT-02 Senator A.F.E. 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

God have mercy on the young women of the USSR

[PSOL]

God have mercy on the young women of the USSR

While Beria was terrible, the claim that he was a pedophile or engaged in sexual relations with teenagers to merit the designation more than anyone else at the time is slander. Specifically the only proof we have of this is from departments under the order of Kruschev, so who knows how truthful it really is.

[The Mikado]

Specifically re: Cold War issues, while Beria was brutal at home he was on the dovish side of Cold War tensions, but institutional factors limited even the most powerful premiers and definitely would have limited Beria's ability to try to defuse tensions between the USA and USSR. First off, I doubt the US or West Germany ever would have accepted the idea Beria toyed around with of trading German reunification under West German leadership for Germany leaving NATO, being permanently disarmed, and no NATO bases or presence in Germany. This proposal gets discussed regularly as a what if vs the actual reality of the Berlin Wall going up in 1961 and reunification's prevention until the 1990s, but there's really nothing in it for the US. All NATO forces out of West Germany in return for all Warsaw Pact forces out of East Germany is just a pure win for the Soviet Union strategically. In addition, the Adenauer government would not have liked being diplomatically isolated and disarmed in exchange for unification. West Germany being a key member in NATO and the emerging EEC was a far better deal for Germany than that.