Suppose that Joubert survives the Battle of Novi and is the general who backs Sieyes's 18 Brumaire coup, as he originally intended. The Constitution of Year VIII is much more in line with Sieyes's original ideas, and intended to establish political stability by forming an oligarchy which will...
In terms of PoD, I was thinking a more successful Second Mexican Empire (lasting at least into the 1870s), which leads to better Franco-Austrian relations and thus a willingness of the Austrians to ally with France without the Italians.
If by "matter of degree" you mean "completely different context and a couple orders of magnitude" then sure. Someone probably could also make the case that a fascist dictatorship in the USA is also only different in a "matter of degree" from the Wilson administration.
Lenin was in charge of a country in the middle of a bloody, ideological civil war and that was also being invaded by over a dozen foreign powers all dead-set on killing every last Bolshevik.
Also, there are some pretty huge differences in scale between the two's governments.
You're talking as though penal labor and covert internal security are hugely original ideas. The covert internal security of the NKVD was totally structurally unrelated to the previous Okhrana. They resembled them by parallel evolution, they were not inherited. Mass penal labor in the sense...
No. To some extent, the Leninist bureaucracy was inherited from the Tsarist bureaucracy but... that's it. Economically, politically and socially, they were hugely and fundamentally different from start to finish.
The closest similarity you can point out is that they were authoritarian, but...
Free Dixie Socialist Republic (or some variant thereof) is the best name for such a state, imo. It's clear, concise, and avoids the problems of "Confederate" (namely, that the revolutionaries will hate the Confederacy with a firey passion) and "American" (there's a country that calls itself...
What about an earlier PoD? Maybe the US winds up on the side of the Central Powers in WWI, and the Russians take Alaska back. Then, I dunno, the Germans (who won WWI ittl) try to found a European Union, which collapses on itself with the collapse of Austria-Hungary.
I think The Revolution Will Be Live had a decent PoD (bigger post-WWI socialist movement that gets crushed and sends the country to the hard right), with the United States becoming exaggeratedly conservative and vaguely fascistic and all the various problems of the 60s and 70s (race problems...
Here's a basic outline of a TL:
1995: Yeltsin dies, Chernomyrdin succeeds him. The KPRF takes a thin control of parliament, forces the remainder of Chernomyrdin's term to have absolutely nothing happen.
1996: With no serious moderate candidates, and the oligarchs divided on who to support...