This is a teaser from the cold war mod for hoi4 btw.
Lmao the version of fucking Gorbachev in the path on the very right:
Mikhail Gorbachev
(1980-1991)
FP: Confrontation
Goals: Restore True Stalinism
It's cursed but I can absolutely see him being pro Stalin in a timeline where Khrushchev never gets near the levers of power and soviet socialism works much better. He was like 25 when the secret speech came in our timeline so he could change dramatically by 1980 when he's 49 years old.
He's definitely someone who'd be defined more by the people around him than anything. The cleanest summary of him I've seen was that he was likable and competent but generally bad at coming up with ideas of his own: he was never some secret anticommunist mastermind schemer who fooled everyone around him for decades, just kind of a capable but gullible guy who was a good communist when surrounded by communists and an anti-communist stooge when surrounded by anti-communist sucdems and liberals.
I don't know what Katushev's "reform" polices are supposed to be in that tree: if its liberalization then it's basically just painting Gorbachev as a contrarian who'll act against the status quo just because, which I don't think is accurate considering how much he relied on the people around him to actually guide policy.
"Neo-Stalinist Gorbachev" is a good bit, though.
I believe the mod has Gorbachev and Katushev as both aligned with suslov and the rest of party who are against Kaganovich’s plans like cybernetics. So Katushev would be reforming the economy back away from Kaganovich and Gorbachev would continue in deKaganovichisation. I have no clue if kaganovich was particularly pro cybernetics or if suslov was against them but that seems to be how the mod portrays them
