The most obvious is the 1986 Chernobyl event for me.
The 1971 India-Pakistan war and creation of Bangladesh
I’m going to need a little more hand-holding on what to do with that, I’m very unfamiliar with the general region.
Basically East Pakistan ( now Bangladesh ) wanted independence from Pakistan. Which led to the Pakistani military committing genocide with deaths estimated from 300k - 3 million
Eventually war breaks out with a Pakistani preemptive strike on Indian airfields. The war lasts around two weeks with an Indian/Bangladeshi victory. Around 8-10 million refugees went to India.
The US supported Pakistan and did not want India to intervene. Mainly because India had good relations with the USSR I suppose. The USSR supported India and Bangladeshi Independence and would support India against the US and China
So during the war the US sends in a carrier group to the Indian Ocean to send a message, which was countered by the USSR sending their navy. Nixon tried to get China to send troops to the Indian border but they did not agree. China had defeated India recently in the 1962 and supported Pakistan.
So there are many ways things could’ve gone differently. What if China and the US did enter the war, or just one of them? What if the the USSR was neutral here? I want to read a lot more about this time period
How were Pakistan and Bangladesh ever able to be one country with the large distance between them?
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
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.
Dipping back into the 40s but only because I think it’s really interesting—What if Henry A. Wallace had stayed FDR’s vice president in 1945 instead of Truman? Dem party elites conspired in Truman’s favor at the convention as Wallace was considered too far left and too friendly towards the USSR.
The Truman Doctrine and other foundations of the cold war and US Anti-communism evaporate. Would there even be a cold war? Probably, but a minimum of 4 more years of non-adversarial relations with the USSR might have set things on a better track.
Also, Japan almost certainly doesn’t get nuked which is nice.
