Comment by vkou

Without a cold war you'd have had some other imperial imbalance. The only reason the Anglosphere and the EU are in alliance is because of a rival superpower. Without the commies to scare the shit out of them, they'd still all be squabbling with each other over colonies, and we'd all probably be working 70 hours a week, as our owners would not feel any pressure to make concessions to labour.

Or, alternatively, there may have well been a communist revolution in the industrialized countries, as opposed to the agrarian backwaters that actually got them.

And China going communist can be blamed as much on things like the Opium wars, or Japan's imperialism, or the international repression of the Boxer rebellion or any of the other things that fueled a reactionary nationalistic fire in it. There's only so long you can keep kicking a country of nearly a billion people before someone gets it in their head to drive out the foreigners, and they usually aren't the type to be winning any peace prizes, if you get my drift.

It's all just a bunch of what-ifs. The only thing that we can know for certain is that the Soviet empire sucked, a lot, especially for its European subjects. Empires tend to. But its existence probably played a major role in decolonization - and wrecking other empires.