ORIGINAL: rustysi
ORIGINAL: mind_messing
We're forgetting the impact that the fall of Stalingrad would have on Russian morale and internal politics.
1941 had been an absolute disaster for the Russians, and 1942 hadn't exactly been the annus mirabilis either. Leningrad was still under siege and despite the gains made around Rzhev, the Germans had still managed to come up trumps at 2nd Kharhov. A great deal of the Soviet Union was still under German/Axis occupation.
Stalin was throwing the kitchen sink into defending the city with his name. If it had fallen, it's easy to see that a sense of defeatism could have crept into the Soviet High Command - they'd thrown the Germans back from Moscow, but the Germans had bounced back and Case Blau looked like it was going to be 1941 all over again.
Stalin knew that the GPW was a fight for his own life, let alone anything else, so the most likely scenario would be a coup that puts him out of the picture and sends overtures of terms to the Germans allowing the Soviets to cut their losses and run for the Urals to bide their time.
Khrushchev, probably more than any other Soviet figure, was ideally placed to judge both the military and the political situation during the Battle of Stalingrad. If he says that the Soviet Union would have collapsed if the city had fallen, I'd be inclined to take his word for it. Granted - with a pinch of salt: it does his reputation and ego no harm to be known to have been involved in the battle that decided the fate of the Soviet Union.
All good points, but I'm just not sure the Soviets would have folded upon losing the battle. After all even if they had lost the city they still put a hurtin' on the German war machine. There was still the idological battle to consider, Nazism vs. Communism. Just MHO.
Consider the bid against Hitler's life in Germany in 1944, sparked off by Operation Overlord, with the fuel provided by a long series of German military defeats.
It's quite easy to draw comparisons with the Soviet Union in 1941 - with the shambles of the Red Army in 1941 and the failure to hold Stalingrad in 1942 providing the motivation for some of the Soviet High Command to seriously consider replacing Stalin.