In 1929 an army officer assassinated Stalin at his dacha. His friend Sergei Kirov staged a coup for control of the government and initiated a massive purge of the army and party. This resulted in an uprising staged by Leon Trotsky (freed from internal exile in Kazakhstan) and other surviving members of the Left Opposition remaining in the USSR and Tukhachevsky (former red army chief of staff and as of '30 commander of Volga Military District) alongside other sympathetic elements of the Red Army. A rival government was set up in Leningrad and the LeftOpp and Kirovites waged a two year civil war which was won by the LeftOpp.



Now in control of the whole Soviet Union, the Left Opposition initiated a reform culminating in the 1933 Constitution of the USSR, which separated the judiciary from the legislature and created an ethics department in Sovnarkom. Homosexuality was re-legalized and transsexuality as it was known at the time would be legalized in 1938. The USSR became a haven for persecuted LGBT people around the world, while the Soviet state became increasingly dominated by the ethnic minorities of the former Russian Empire, the de-Russification programs of the 1920s were intensified, and voluntary collectivization movements were encouraged and supplied by the state alongside smallholders, while the state provided both a wage and a fixed price for agricultural produce. Agro-towns were built with increasing frequency to provide for rural needs while education and healthcare were prioritized as in our timeline alongside family planning and other social services.



Rapid industrial growth was supplied by western loans and trade in the USSR's gold reserves, while rural services and decentralized industrial growth gradually became the norm in the countryside as the Agro-Towns spread and diversified.



While the USSR continued to trade with Germany in gas after the emergence of the Nazi regime, the state did not agree to the partition of Eastern Europe, instead supporting Polish and Baltic partisans fighting the Nazis when they invaded in 1939-40. In 1941, Germany alongside its Baltic, Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian allies launched a gigantic invasion of the USSR, which resulted in the death of nearly a fifth of the pre-war population of the country. Following the 1942 Battles of Zhlobagrad and Astrakhan, a Nazi summer offensive into the Caucasus was thwarted and thereafter the Germans and their allies were on the defensive before Tukhachevsky took Berlin in 1945.



In the west, the Germans were able to ascertain the real planned location of the Normandy invasion and to defeat the initial wave of attacks before managing to contain the UK/US/Canadian forces for several months. Operation Dragoon and a Free French uprising in Berry resulted in a coordinated withdrawal behind the river Seine and widespread destruction in Paris despite it being declared an open city. In the highlands of western Germany the Wehrmacht was able to resist for several more months before the fall of Berlin resulted in a fighting retreat to the east and a suicidal rearguard defence of the Rhine led by SS units under the command of the self-declared second Fuhrer Arthur Seys-Inquart.



No atomic weapons program was seriously pursued by the Western Allies, following the testimony of Albert Einstein and a group of other physicists that the notion of atomic weapons and the program to create them was a Nazi insanity and should not be undertaken; a testimony intended to exaggerate the hypothetical weapon's impracticality (some thought it would have to be a machine as large as a capital ship) in order to spare the world from its destructive potential should it ever be realized.



As a result, the final end of the war came between October and December, 1945; when the USSR Pacific Fleet's invasion of Hokkaido and Tohoku and defeat of the IJN at the Battle of Rebun spurred an accelerated Olympic-Coronet invasion. The IJA resisted hard on the well-defended roads of central Kyushu and in the beginning Kamikaze flights were made out of rapidly collapsing Japanese Korea, but the invasion of the Kanto Plain and the Fall of Tokyo resulted in the death of the emperor and the surrender of the government. At the same time, Yoshio Shiga, Kyuichi Tokuda and other leaders of the Japanese Communist Party rejoined Sanzo Nosaka on his return from China, meeting with Red Army commanders in Sendai to establish the People's Republic of Japan.



Korea was liberated with the help of the Red Army while Lyuh Woon-Hyung's People's Republic of Korea was recognized as the legitimate government of the whole peninsula. The US Army launched a military intervention under president Dorothy Thompson in South China which became known as the Kwangsi War and resulted in the ROC surviving on the mainland until 1952, when the PRC launched new mechanized offensives which resulted in the lines rolling back until the US evacuated via Guangzhou and the ROC was relocated to Taiwan.



The Rhineland was annexed into France in the post-war settlement in order for its heavy industry to be commandeered to help the victorious allies rebuild Europe together. The part of the Netherlands south of the Rhine was placed under UN mandate and consulted by referendum to join Belgium before doing so with a significant majority. This resulted in a Flemish majority in Belgium and threat of the loss of representation for the French-speaking southern half of the country known as Wallonia. This in turn resulted in the Kingdom of Belgium being dissolved and after the peaceful secession of the Republic of Wallonia a Flemish-nationalist government formed in the north backed by flemish-speaking elements of the army. The monarchy sided with the northern regime which was organized as the Kingdom of Flanders, while the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi became Flemish colonies.



The Dutch East Indies was occupied by the French after liberation from the Japanese and the Fourth Republic committed vast military forces to waging war on anti-colonial partisans in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia, before losing Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu. The Hindu nationalist government of the post-independence Republic of India enacted policies that resulted in uprisings in Begal, Sikkim, Assam, Hyderabad, and Kashmir as well as the flight of much of the Muslim and leftist-secularist elements of the state westwards to the new state of Democratic Aryavarta established in opposition to the government in Delhi and supported by the USSR and China, as well as the new Bengali, Sikkimese and Assamese republics. Arunchal Pradesh was annexed by the PRC; Ladakh, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Gujarat and the Punjab joined Aryavarta, while West Bengal joined the People's Republic of Bengal, and the Democratic Republics of Assam and Sikkim were formed.



The UK remained in Burma and Tibet after the independence of India and controlled large swathes of southeastern China while allied with the surviving RoC. The UK was able to significantly help the RoC and the US/Philippines to maintain a foothold on the Asian continent, but eventually the PRC ground down the front to the point that it became untenable and the UK pulled out of Tibet, Burma, and China while the CPT insurgency took Lhasa and overthrew the Lamaist theocracy.