YMMV / Twilight of the Red Tsar

• Complete Monster: Joseph Stalin, having survived the stroke that killed him in OTL, launches massive purges of Soviet society that kills hundreds of thousands, with many Soviet leaders, even loyal veterans, like Zhukov, being gruesomely executed. Continuing with the "Doctor's Plot", amplified by his paranoia, Stalin orders a purge of Jews from Soviet society, included loyal followers, persecuting them badly enough to have his actions labeled as the "Soviet Holocaust" or "The Great Pogrom". When the Sino-Soviet split happens due to disagreements with Mao Zedong, leading to the Sino-Soviet war, Stalin uses chemical weapons, unleashes smallpox on the Chinese, and destroys many villages before finishing the war by nuking Chinese cities just to spite Mao as Stalin starts to feel his own death, killing 50 million Chinese in the war. Out of prejudice and paranoia, Stalin orders an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Caucasus region and the Baltic states, save Lithuania, deporting its indigenous people into prison camps in Siberia, killing hundreds of thousands. Having destroyed many nations due to ambition, hatred and paranoia, Stalin left a bloody legacy that eventually lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, now the most hated nation in the world.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • While Joseph Stalin had crossed this well before the POD in OTL, in TTL his anti-Semitism evolving into the extreme plus his war of aggression and nuking of a fellow communist state only served to further break apart the radical left.
  • The Soviet government crosses this during the Soviet Civil War by massacring 100,000 Chechens, and by starving and working to death over a million slave laborers in Central Asia.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Considering the premise involves one of the most infamous dictators in history living longer, this is more or less inevitable. Stalin's atrocities were horrible and terrifying enough in the original timeline, but he pushes his historical monstrosity to whole new levels here.
  • The entire Sino-Soviet War, by far the most damaging war in history. Millions of Chinese are horrifically killed by Soviet WMDs, Beijing and other cities are hit by hydrogen bombs, entire villages are massacred by Red Army troops and both military and civilians are hit with bioweapon after bioweapon from the USSR. The refugee crisis it causes it also horrific, with millions of diseased Chinese refugees left to die in overcrowded and germ-infested slums across Southeast Asia.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The anarcho-syndicalist movement, a libertarian and much more democratic branch of socialism, gets a boost in TTL after being crushed by both capitalist and fascist powers in the previous decades.