This question must have been asked at this site at least once but if so - looking for the threads is pointless because comments are hidden.
This question must have been asked at this site at least once but if so - looking for the threads is pointless because comments are hidden.
Hard to say, of course. I think the USSR still would've faced a crisis in which their best ideologues died in WW2. At the same time, there would be less rhetorical ammunition for a Kruschev-type revisionism and maybe Lenin could've set up a more robust system for leadership development by the time he passed. Leadership being made up of popular / powerful figures during the revolution was not a good recipe for continued revolutionary governance: they needed a rotation driven by good Marxist analysis and engagement by the people, instead they got top-level conspiratorial nonsense and a consistent movement towards the restoration of liberalism.
Without a doubt, Lenin would've been a more major target of anticommunist propaganda, rather than Stalin.
Lenin dying early did a lot of legwork in assassinating Stalin's character because the Capitalists could always say "yeah equality sounds good, idealism is fine, communism works good on paper blah blah blah but you see once the revolution gets taken over by Evil Man it was corrupted and that's also inevitable"