These are interesting questions from several aspects. Is history, or some parts of it, inevitable?
What would have happened it it had been Trotsky, not Stalin, Beria, not Khrushchev, Guevara, not Castro, and so on?
Would the USSR still stand if it had been Carter in 1980?
Tough stuff to wrap our (my) simple minds around.
To start with, I believe that God (I AM THAT I AM) exists seated across all time seeing it simultaneously; you and I see it revealed bit by bit on a continuum. He sees what we will do, even before we have exercised our free will. That HE knows (foreknowledge) and sees results (foreordination, prophecy, etc.) does not take from us our free will in the moment.
That said, had Pharoah tripped and broke his neck, the Israelites would still have gone into bondage, IMHO. Things that have to happen on this planet to fulfill God’s word will happen, one way or another.
Like I said- hard to wrap one’s mind around...
God Bless!
I think that there are a dozen different things that end up being where we end up. For example, if Nicholas II of Russia had been smart and granted a Duma and constitution and ended up no longer being an autocrat, revolution would have been thwarted and Communism very possibly avoided. Then Stalin would have possibly become a decorated general in the Tsarist military and ended up being a key fighter against the Nazis in WWII while Lenin would have been a university professor teaching something other than the finer academic points of a genocidal philosophy.
But then, if he had not married Alix of Hesse, who became Empress Alexandra, who ended up giving birht to a hemophiliac son, relying on Rasputin who encouraged Alexandra to push her husband against granting a constitutional form of government, well, maybe there would have been a different outcome.
It’s all a matter (I think) of whether or not there is a disturbance in the natural flow of things. If the German government had taken the overthrow seriously, then Hitler would have been shot and then the Nazi party, as a real legitimate politicial movement would have been thwarted. Hitler was a driving force behind the Nazis, without him there would have been nothing and the monsters would have remained in the backrooms of beer halls or the basements of ratty shacks in the middle of nowhere.
“Would the USSR still stand if it had been Carter in 1980?”
Would the USA still stand if it had been Carter in 1980?