Soviet union into the 21st century?

[Achronism]

Hi, AH-fans!

I'm currently in the research phase for a planned graphic novel (spy thriller about a KGB agent, escaping from the Eastern bloc).

The story's scenario is set in our current time, with the huge difference that the Soviet union still exist and that the Cold war is still ongoing (albeit after a prolonged period of deténte between the superpowers).

The POD is in 1984. It was decided not to elect Chernenko as General secretary of the CPSU. Instead it was decided that Gorbachev was ready for the job.

Considering the different reform plans that Gorbachev had (more efficient economy, boosting the technology, letting in western comsumer goods and culture for the people, letting foreign powers invest), my question is this:

Is there some way that the reforms could have saved the Soviet union from stagnation and poverty and made it survive into our current time?
(Without the historical event that too much loosening of censorship and repression of ethnic groups made the Soviet union ultimately disintegrate).

Thanks beforehand

 

[The Yogi]

My take, positing the whole package of Gorbachev reforms, is no. The Soviet Union was held together solely by brute force and repression. Ease those, and the whole rotten structure comes crashing down.

If we imagine a Perestroika without Glasnost, that is to say, a more Chinese-style economic only liberalisation, then it should be possible to keep the old USSR going, just as the Chinese communist party is still very much in power. The critical thing, with or without reforms of the economy, is to never back down from, as a last resort at least, drowning all opposition in blood. You'd have to throw in a signal event showing that the regime would not balk at wholesale slaughter (an analouge to Tiananmen square) when people begin to draw the "wrong" conclusions about liberalisation.

I doubt however that the Soviet economy coud have been substantially improved through limited reforms. More likely, stagnation and poverty would continue to present day, ever worsening.

 

[The Red]

If you prevent the August Coup, the Soviet Union could probably continue to exist in the form of the Union of Sovereign States which might become something akin to a superpower with a Belarussian style government.

 

[euromellows]

Its probably possible to keep the Soviet Union alive with almost no reforms. It won't be pretty and there'll be a lot of poverty, but a North Korean style Soviet Union is not entirely out of the question.

Things would probably be a little better than North Korea since the USSR has a plethora of natural resources to build an economy on.

This setting, while incredibly dystopic, might make a more interesting environment for your proposed graphic novel as opposed to a fascist-capitalist society. It presents a very clear contrast. Of course as its your story the decision is entirely yours.

 

[Corbell Mark IV]

My take, positing the whole package of Gorbachev reforms, is no. The Soviet Union was held together solely by brute force and repression. Ease those, and the whole rotten structure comes crashing down.

If we imagine a Perestroika without Glasnost, that is to say, a more Chinese-style economic only liberalisation, then it should be possible to keep the old USSR going, just as the Chinese communist party is still very much in power. The critical thing, with or without reforms of the economy, is to never back down from, as a last resort at least, drowning all opposition in blood. You'd have to throw in a signal event showing that the regime would not balk at wholesale slaughter (an analouge to Tiananmen square) when people begin to draw the "wrong" conclusions about liberalisation.

I doubt however that the Soviet economy coud have been substantially improved through limited reforms. More likely, stagnation and poverty would continue to present day, ever worsening.

I agree.

Would help to avoid Afganistan. That revealed weakness.

Economic reforms not political ones.

And higher oil prices would help.

 

[RMcD94]

If you take 1984 and Brave New World as handguides to dystopias, then the embracement of technology could see dissension almost completely halted, imagine the FBI which kills/sticks in camps anyone who posted anything bad about the USA. Imagine in the schools that they make you every day chant to a flag symbolising the USSR, then you get diehard loyalists that will want flag burning to be illegal entirely on their own.

So yeah, how can revolts get off the ground when their leaders know their families will die if they speak up, or protests are met with gas?

 

[Whanztastic]

Read the wiki page of Nikolai Ryzhkov to see that there were different economic actions the USSR could've taken that could have preserved it. Also, if Gorby didn't piss off Yeltsin that'd help.

It really is plausible with an '85 POD, good hunting.

 

[superkuf]

By 1984 SU was stagnating. The economy survived only due to export of raw materials (mainly oil and gas), corruption was endemic, demography sucked (soviet women didn't have children, soviet men drunk themselves to death) and the West had begun the high-tech military race that SU simply couldn't follow.

The SU had several problems to come (and that IOTL helped to destroy the SU). Lokal strongmen realized they could start to confront the central powers - which Boris Yeltsin did several times and finally succeded to create Russia apart from SU. Television made it more difficult to keep out western programs and ideas (http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/movies/12disco.html?_r=0 for descripion of how the soap opera Dallas changed Estonia). In electronics and computers SU was far behind the west, and five years plans could not keep up with Silicon Walley. SU agriculture became steadily worse, with the need to import foreign foodstuff. SU economy was out of control, with no one knowing things lika trade deficits, budget etc. And maybe most important the hard core of the communist party that Stalin appointed after the ourges 1936-38 became old and dying. Their successors simply didn't believe in neither communism nor stalinist ways to keep the power.

The european satellite states were leaving, despite decades of occupation and education. Poland were due to Solidarity and catholicism de facto lost to SU after 1981. Even the baltic states wanted independency. The various communist countries abroad (Cuba, Vietnam etc) were pure losses economically and useless from a military standpoins (at least in 1984),

I agree that economic reforms á la China could help, but the SU had a lot of problems that China never suffered. If China occupied Korea, Vietnam and parts of Siberia (still with restless non-Chinese natives) Dengs reforms would have been far more difficult.

The SU could have survived, but that survival would mean stagnation and poverty.

 

[Robert]

The only way that the Soviet Union could survive would be for Ronald Reagan not to have been President of the United States.

In 1983 the only people who believed that the Soviet Union could, and should be brought down, were Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

A President Mondale would have been more then willing to cut back defense, and even provided economic support to the Soviet Union in hopes of maintaining the peace.

 

[Achronism]

The only way that the Soviet Union could survive would be for Ronald Reagan not to have been President of the United States.

In 1983 the only people who believed that the Soviet Union could, and should be brought down, were Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

A President Mondale would have been more then willing to cut back defense, and even provided economic support to the Soviet Union in hopes of maintaining the peace.

I see your point. Thanks.

I've considered that. In this ATL Reagan leaves the office following a severe stroke and presidency is transferred to vice president George HW Bush, which marks the begining of a less aggressive rethoric towards the SU.

 

[Achronism]

Thank y'all for swift replies

Yes, I've contemplated a russian analogue to the Xiaoping reforms, where SU economy is directed towards a semi-capitalist one
(supply and demand production with a level of ministral regulation, liberty of starting your own small-scale business and vast trading with Europe foremost - maybe through some special legal zone-cities).

And on a more daring scale I've thought about a scenario where China steps in, let its companies invest in huge shares of russian production (win-win for both economies?)
What do you make of that? Plausible? I realize that China probably has to cut their ties to America before this development, by some reason. Any suggestions?

 

[Paul V McNutt]

I thin you need an earlier POD and you also need a Chinese model. Keep the repressive government and introduce free enterprise.

 

[Sam R.]

I thin you need an earlier POD and you also need a Chinese model. Keep the repressive government and introduce free enterprise.

Except it doesn't work. It is a fantasy like removing the NHS without fascism in the UK. It took the youth sections of the nomeklatura engaged in capitalist graft over 5 years to dismantle the firm level social security, after the working class had been removed from its justifying position in state ideology.

That isn't possible within the frame work of the Soviet Union. And it was only possible in China because the urban working class and the party-aligned intelligentsia were so goddamned small (see Tiananmen).

This thread is full of orientalism.

yours,
Sam R.

 

[RousseauX]

My take, positing the whole package of Gorbachev reforms, is no. The Soviet Union was held together solely by brute force and repression. Ease those, and the whole rotten structure comes crashing down.

If we imagine a Perestroika without Glasnost, that is to say, a more Chinese-style economic only liberalisation, then it should be possible to keep the old USSR going, just as the Chinese communist party is still very much in power. The critical thing, with or without reforms of the economy, is to never back down from, as a last resort at least, drowning all opposition in blood. You'd have to throw in a signal event showing that the regime would not balk at wholesale slaughter (an analouge to Tiananmen square) when people begin to draw the "wrong" conclusions about liberalisation.

I doubt however that the Soviet economy coud have been substantially improved through limited reforms. More likely, stagnation and poverty would continue to present day, ever worsening.

For a variety of reasons Chinese style economic reform isn't really possible for the Soviet Union.

 

[RousseauX]

Thank y'all for swift replies

Yes, I've contemplated a russian analogue to the Xiaoping reforms, where SU economy is directed towards a semi-capitalist one
(supply and demand production with a level of ministral regulation, liberty of starting your own small-scale business and vast trading with Europe foremost - maybe through some special legal zone-cities).

The problem with this is that small-scale business is exactly that: small scale, since the largest portion of the economy will still be dominated by the state sector thus the economy as a whole will still be extremely inefficient.

China can resolve this problem since China's economy was decidedly low-income, which means it can sustain rapid economical growth and the sector which grew would be the private/semi-private sector. So you can have the state sector more or less stay "as is" but still become a smaller proportion of the economy. The issue with this is that the Soviet Union was decidedly middle-income and will be unable to grow fast enough nor adopt the industries (such as rural labour-intensive textile manufacturing) that exemplified Chinese success.

The other issue is political, since what you are describing sounds like Hungary in the 80s: creating a private sector fundamentally discredits the legitimacy of the Communist Party (this is exactly what happened in Hungary): unless of course, the private sector are largely foreign so you can reframe the debate from public vs private to us vs foreign, which brings us to:

And on a more daring scale I've thought about a scenario where China steps in, let its companies invest in huge shares of russian production (win-win for both economies?)
What do you make of that? Plausible? I realize that China probably has to cut their ties to America before this development, by some reason. Any suggestions?

You can't have this because China of the 1980s did not have the capital to invest, China was the largest -recipient- of FDI in the world actually, and that was largely what helped China to transition without incurring the political penalties for the CCP.

And also, keep in mind politics: I -cannot- see the USSR allowing China to own industries in their country, China could allow western investors to do so because China essentially admitted that it was behind the west and needed to catchup. I can't see the Soviets of the 80s admit that China is doing better than itself.

 

[RousseauX]

The only way that the Soviet Union could survive would be for Ronald Reagan not to have been President of the United States.

In 1983 the only people who believed that the Soviet Union could, and should be brought down, were Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

A President Mondale would have been more then willing to cut back defense, and even provided economic support to the Soviet Union in hopes of maintaining the peace.

Jesus Christ lay off the Reagan worshipping/Democrat demonizing because hurr conservative god Reagan took down the USSR is decidedly untrue.

 

[Aelita]

The only hope for a reversal of the decline of the Soviet Union is to improve the efficiency of the state sector. Foreign investment is a geopolitical impossibility given the Soviet Union's superpower status, and as others have noted, even the ailing Soviet economy was gigantic by world standards, so it would not have the same effect it had on the much smaller Chinese economy.

And there's the problem. The corruption and inefficiency of the state sector was the source of the power and privilege of party members and the nomenklatura. The only real ways to have a significant impact on those problems (going full Stalinist or multiparty democracy) would in the 1980s both result in the end of the Soviet Union.

 

[RousseauX]

And there's the problem. The corruption and inefficiency of the state sector was the source of the power and privilege of party members and the nomenklatura. The only real ways to have a significant impact on those problems (going full Stalinist or multiparty democracy) would in the 1980s both result in the end of the Soviet Union.

I wonder about the former actually, is it plausible for the USSR go to the path of North Korea?

 

[Aelita]

I wonder about the former actually, is it plausible for the USSR go to the path of North Korea?

I don't think so. North Korea was always more insular than the Soviet Union, and geography conspired to aid that. As a global superpower, and the hegemon over the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union had a much more open population, and much greater contact with the west.

By the mid 80s, the Soviet intelligentsia were probably the most pro-American people on the planet, and they'd gotten pretty unrealistically good expectations about what capitalism would bring for them and their country. Similarly, the people in the non-Russian republics no longer had much commitment to the union. Even older generations, who remembered the Great Patriotic War felt increasingly that it was time for a separation, or at the very least a drastic shift of power away from Moscow.

The shift, even from the 70s to the 80s was pretty drastic. Michael Parenti recalled the massive shift during his own visits to the Soviet Union. While on a goodwill tour in the 1970s, he remembered the Soviet attache who was their guide telling them that "there is no prostitution in the Soviet Union!"

Even as a Communist, Parenti found this hard to believe, so he inquired further, telling the party delegate that he'd seen prostitutes hanging out near by the hotel he was staying in, to which she replied "Well, those women all have fulltime jobs during the day!"

In all likelihood, she knew she was speaking falsehoods, but still bothered to put on appearances for the foreigners. By the 1980s, this attitude had changed. A Soviet colleague of Parenti, and a good party member, told him on a post-Glasnost visit that "Even the poor in your country live better than I do."

This man was a Soviet academic, who had a good by any standard flat in Moscow, a personal collection of thousands of books, and access to a dacha outside the city for vacation, guaranteed job security for life, and what was then an iron-clad pension, had certainly gotten himself some pretty unrealistic expectations. And he was far from alone. The Soviet intelligentsia of the 1980s all got at least a little misty-eyed over "America".

 

[Russian Sailor]

Maybe what would need to happen is a change in the higher administration. Maybe if Beria was in charge or something...