The most obvious is the 1986 Chernobyl event for me.
The Cuban Revolution. The martyrdom of Che, that one Soviet submarine commander that chose to not hit the nuke button, Reagan and Thatcher surviving assassination attempts, Yuri Andropov dying too early, Gorbachev becoming the leader of the Soviet Union, the ultra-Left gang of 4 lost the rightists in the PRC and were subsequently purged, the Red Scare 2 happened and drove CPUSA underground, Korean War, Vietnam War, Afghanistan War, the Israel wars, the decolonization movements across Africa, Khrushchev and Zhukov usurping the central committee of the CPSU after the death of Stalin, etc.
Without Vasily Arkhipov saying “no”, we don’t have any advanced human civilization to speak of.
There is no way the second red scare does not happen in some form with the CPUSA voluntarily declawing during WWII. The capitalist state was going to liquidate it no matter what and the only unique thing about McCarthy was the style of theater he employed.
Disagreed, the name change from CPUSA to CPA - which one can concider a form of liquidation in the sense that the Leninist party of a new type model was abandoned in favor of moving towards becoming a more mainstream party in a precurser to the eurocommunist parties of europe - stems from Browder’s blunder in assuming FDR wouldn’t suddenly croak in office during the time Henry Wallace got replaced with a rattlesnake southern Democrat who would lead the crusade to liquidate the American u.s-soviet coexistence wing of government alongside the Reds in the purge.
The old party during the Browderite dissolution, and I would argue even when during the greatest heights of the Red Scare 2 was a materially a stronger party than the current CPUSA which suffered a true liquidation in the early 2000s at the hands of the Webbite social fascists that wormed their way into power.
So actually, I just let Stalin die. I think I’ll world-build in an explanation that’ll make sense naturally in the context of everything else going on, but fundamentally change nothing. The actual change I’m putting in related to Stalin is that the Soviet-sino split actually goes in the opposite direction and the USSR undergoes Restalinisation shortly after the Soviet-sino split. My actual narration is set in the 1980s.
If I recall after Khrushchev there were a few movements to restore Stalin’s legacy all the way up to Andropov.
Here’s some reading on it
https://twitter.com/After__History/status/1657177824933847041
