Any Countries that could have became Soviet S.S.R's?

MountainPuncher

MountainPuncher

As the title says, is there any countries that could have been added to the Soviet Union?

Potential candidates are possibly Finland, Mongolia, East Turkestan, etc.
Are there any other candidates?

Discuss.
 

Napoleon IV

In 1963 and 1973 Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov asked to joined the Soviet Union, although it's unclear if he was serious or just trying to butter the Soviets up.

There was an attempt to make Poland part of the Soviet Union during the Polish-Soviet War, but the Soviet failure to conquer Poland doomed that effort.

There was a proposal during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for the Soviets to annex the northern portion of Afghanistan (which is dominated by ethnicities that were already in the Soviet Union like Uzbeks and Tajiks).
 

Dementor

Banned
Bulgaria is not realistic - the Soviet Union would never accept and the offer was not serious in any case (it had lots of platitudes about Soviet-Bulgarian friendship and many to-the-point suggestions how the Soviets could help Bulgaria right now but basically nothing specific about how Bulgaria was supposed to accede to the Soviet Union).

I would say the most likely possibility would be Finland. It would likely have happened if the Soviets had conquered Finland during the Winter War.
 
Last edited:

Iron Chariot

Mahabad Kurdistan, along with an enlarged Azerbaijani SSR, had the Soviets been able to get everything they had hoped for out of the Iran Crisis of 1946.
 

Dunning Kruger

I seem to recall Mongolia asked to join but was rebuffed.

Finland is most likely if the Winter War goes the same way that the Baltics go.

It would requires some butterflies and a major POD but I can imagine Manchuria. There some big changes that would have to happen but...
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Napoleon IV said:
There was a proposal during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for the Soviets to annex the northern portion of Afghanistan (which is dominated by ethnicities that were already in the Soviet Union like Uzbeks and Tajiks).
Click to expand...
Source, please?
 

David T

The idea of Mongolia joining the USSR does seem to have been floated from time to time--more by Mongolians than by the Soviets:

"Given Mongolia's profound dependence on the Soviet Union, Mongolians had several times proposed that Mongolia join the Soviet Union, yet Soviet leaders, wary of accusations from China, were not supportive. In the late 1920s, radical western Mongols...resented Khalkha domination and proposed that western Mongolia and Tuva together join the Soviet Union. In the 1940s and early 1950s the Soviet-trained technocrats under Choibalsang repeatedly qustioned whether socialism could be built in Mongolia without joining the Soviet Union. The procurator B. Jambaldorj raised the possibility in 1944, when Tuva joined the Soviet Union, and Daramyn Tomorochir and Yumjaagin Tsedenbal raised it again late in Choibalsang's life. Choibalsang himself violently opposed such ideas, but after his death the Mongolian Politburo in 1953 approved unification, only to be rebuked by V. M. Molotov for their 'simple-minded error.' In the mid-1970s the Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev sounded out his Mongolian counterpart Tsedenbal about this issue. By then, however, the very success of Mongolian industrialization with Soviet aid had decreased Mongolia's perceived need for unification, and the issue was dropped." Article "Soviet Union and Mongolia," p. 515 in Christopher P. Atwoood, *Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire* (New York: Facts on File, 2004)
 

ObssesedNuker

Mongolia and Finland are the obvious one. Poland could happen too, but it requires the Soviet-Polish war to go another way. That's about the upper limit though.
 
LSCatilina

LSCatilina

- Laz SSR, in the case of a particularily lucky stroke against Turkey, could be made in the prolongment of Georgian and Armenian SSR expensions on Soviet claims lines, with Lazistan emerging from an ASSR to a full-fledged SSR in the aftermath of Stalin and Beria's death in order to counter a too powerful Georgia.

- Along an already mentioned Polish SSR, I think a Lithuanian SSR (or Lithuanian-Bielorussan SSR, at least until the mid-1920's rationalisations) would have relatively fair chances to pop up in a victorious Soviet advance westwards, along with the Latvian SSR

- Similarily, with the establishment of a Finnish SSR in the 1920, if the Reds won the civil war, could be followed by an Esthonian SSR as a rebord and more sovietized Esthonian Commune successor.

- A different set of the conflict in Poland and Ukraine could lead for an equivalent of the short-lvied Galician SSR to form sort of Ruthenian SSR, especially to curb down Polish and Ukranian nationalisms.

- The Volga German Workers' Commune could become, while not realistically, a short-lived Volga German SSR, a bit like the Finno-Karelian SSR.
 

David T

There could be a larger Moldavian SSR, as I posted here last year:

***
What if Stalin had demanded all or part of Moldavia west of the Prut in 1945, to become part of the Moldavian SSR? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mihai_1600.png for a map of historical Moldavia.) Indeed, the very decision in 1940 to call Bessarabia (along with a piece of the old Moldavian ASSR) the Moldavian SSR suggested possible future demands on Romania for more "Moldavian" territory.

To be sure, unlike Bessarabia, Moldavia west of the Prut does not have a century-long history of belonging to the Russian Empire, but still, if the Soviets insist that there is a separate Moldavian language (most linguists regard Moldavian, on both sides of the Prut, as simply a sub-dialect of Daco-Romanian--more like an accent than a dialect; one could just as well speak of the Texan language...) logically why shouldn't they apply it west of the Prut as well as east? So Moldavians west as well as east of the Prut will have to get used to calling their language Moldavian and writing it in Cyrillic to differentiate it from Romanian (though Romanian itself was often written in Cyrillic from the Middle Ages to well into the nineteenth century).

"It is true that the Moldavian version of Romanian has a distinct accent and a more Slavic-influenced lexicon than the Romanian of Bucharest, but to a certain extent these traits are shared by all of historical Moldavia..." http://books.google.com/books?id=n9ycQTKSYdQC&pg=PA13 Very well, then; the USSR demands the unification of all of historical Moldavia (except perhaps for the parts in the Ukrainian SSR) in a single Union Republic...

Why would Stalin do this, when he knows the Communists will dominate Romania? Maybe he thinks even a Communist Romania will be too nationalistic, and desires to restrict its territory as much as possible (at least vis-a-vis the USSR, not necessarily vis-a-vis Hungary).

The most obvious consequence to me is that in 1991 after the USSR falls apart there is much greater demand in this larger *Moldova than in the smaller one (with a proportionately larger Slavic minority) of OTL for union with Romania...

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...mands-unification-of-moldavia-in-1945.402723/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top