AHC: Reform the USSR

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
I asked some questions about Khrushchev yesterday, and know I realize that the question makes more sense if I don't link it to a specific leader.

So, my question is, how can you efficiently reform the Soviet Union of 1960, on the peak of its power, so that it stays in power? You are free to choice what seems to be effective - though, there are some conditions:

1) The Soviet Union has to stay leftist (means of productions, factories, land either owned by the state, or by the people)
2) You can piss of the party, but only after you removed it from power, so he can't overthrow you
3) Once you have disempowered the CPUSSR, prevent the rise of a big capitalist/fascist opposition movement.

Good luck.
 
Make Beria remain general secretary. He was very pro-West, but in order to put him in power, you need a very different Supreme Soviet.
 
I asked some questions about Khrushchev yesterday, and know I realize that the question makes more sense if I don't link it to a specific leader.

So, my question is, how can you efficiently reform the Soviet Union of 1960, on the peak of its power, so that it stays in power? You are free to choice what seems to be effective - though, there are some conditions:

1) The Soviet Union has to stay leftist (means of productions, factories, land either owned by the state, or by the people)
2) You can piss of the party, but only after you removed it from power, so he can't overthrow you
3) Once you have disempowered the CPUSSR, prevent the rise of a big capitalist/fascist opposition movement.

Good luck.

The long term weakness of the Soviet system was its economic system could never compete with the West. It wants just lower levels of education and wealth (the Soviets showed they could definitely compete with the West in key fields of interest, such as engineering and physics). The key problem is it is extremely difficult to separate economic reform from political reform. An oppressive entirely state run system tends to stifle productivity to a huge extent, and that meant that to keep up in the Cold War the USSR had to devote a much bigger proportion of its wealth to heavy industries. This means poorer living condtions, particularly in the Soviet dominated countries outside of Russia (both in the USSR proper and in the Warsaw Pact) which leads to less wealth to be used for development of their civilian industries and economies and for enhancing human capital and furthermore, more discontent within the occupied nations. The soviet economic system could never come anywhere close to matching the economic productivity of a Western country on a per-person basis, and the Soviets never had a major population advantage over the West to make up for it (like Modern China does). The entire Soviet economic system was doomed to a cycle of diminished returns relative to the West, where the Soviets are forced to spend more and more to match the West and this leaves less and less for investing in improving their own standards of living, thus causing productivity per person to stagnate, while it continues to grow in the West. There really is no way to to change that without completely overhauling the core principles of the Soviet union. Gorbechev tried in the 80s, the first thing the different soviet republics did was leave. That's what happens when an oppressive foreign power that holds control largely through fear and the threat of force decides to try and reform, and doesn't provide any sort of economic advantage for the newly released countries to stay in its orbit.

Soviet Power was always doomed to diminish vs the West in every aspect except military hard power, and even that declined relative the West eventually as it became practically impossible for the Soviets to match the West militarily even by spending an enormous proportion of their budget on their military.

To get a Soviet Union that maintains its relative power post 1960 you need an early POD where the very nature of Communism in post-Tsarist Russia is fundamentally different. Or you need a Soviet Union that is willing to conquer and subjugates its rivals before they can militarily catch up and surpass it (particularly before NATO has the nuclear capacity to destroy the Soviet Union if it tries to conquer the West, which conventionally the Soviets could in 1960).

So in my opinion the only post WW2 POV for the Soviets to maintain their relative power post-1960 is to dramatically weaken their enemies, so even with their inefficient system, the Soviets will still have the shear number to stay ahead. The best time for this is in 1945. The Soviets just keep going in Europe and their pretty much isn't anything the Allies can do. The American nuclear weapons are too few and too crude to turn the tide and the Western Armies are to few in number to stop the Soviet advance. The way to preserve Soviet power is to push the allies out of mainland Europe. Then they face a much more manageable foe which is pretty much composed of just the US, UK and the former British dominions. Furthermore, the Russians don't have a land border with their enemy to worry about, as in OTL, meaning its much harder for the US to exhaust them in an arms race. Furthermore, with Western Europe in Soviet hands, they now have a decisive numerical advantage over the West, and they can plunder industry from the occupied countries (France, the Netherlands, ect.) just like they did with East Germany.

Essentially the Soviets were pretty much outmatched in every way except hard power, even in 1960. If they aren't willing to use their military superiority against their rivals they are doomed to falling further and further behind the West.

In short Soviet decline is inevitable, and reform will probably hurt it more than help it in this regard, because brute force is really its only (and diminishing) advantage and it is really the only thing that holds the Wars Pact (and the USSR itself) together.
 
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Stalin pretty much murdered anyone possessing the combination of brains, courage and initiative necessary to enact reforms that were needed. And the survivors were so scarred that none of them were likely to do anything sufficient. So start with Stalin never taking over. Of course, the butterflies are so enormous after you do that...
 
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=294203

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=280530

Just have the USSR adopt more consumer industries, adopt worker's self management and a cybernetic semi-decentralized econony and have a bit (just a bit) of democratization in the USSR and turn it into a federal state, with parties besides the CPSU allowed to form but not centre-right to right-wing parties, just center to communist parties, voila!


P.S.Butterfly the 1950s Eastern Bloc Unrests (In the GDR) by not raising quotas on production, or solve them in a good way for Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.. Have Khrushchev fix his Virgin Lands Campaign like what Hrvatskiwi said in Stars and Sickles, and also not to focus on the arms race but the space race. Also, you gotta have to butterfly Tito, Hoxha, Mao, the Kim Family, the Cuban Missile Crisis, have Finland and Greece go communist and they win in Afghanistan with only limited support for the government there to give them a sense of security.
 
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https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=294203

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=280530

Just have the USSR adopt more consumer industries, adopt worker's self management and a cybernetic semi-decentralized econony and have a bit (just a bit) of democratization in the USSR and turn it into a federal state, with parties besides the CPSU allowed to form but not centre-right to right-wing parties, just center to communist parties, voila!


P.S.Butterfly the 1950s Eastern Bloc Unrests (In the GDR) by not raising quotas on production, or solve them in a good way for Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.. Have Khrushchev fix his Virgin Lands Campaign like what Hrvatskiwi said in Stars and Sickles, and also not to focus on the arms race but the space race. Also, you gotta have to butterfly Tito, Hoxha, Mao, the Kim Family, the Cuban Missile Crisis, have Finland and Greece go communist and they win in Afghanistan with only limited support for the government there to give them a sense of security.

So essentially your solution is to fundamentally change Soviet Communism into a moderate-leftwing multiparty system. That takes a big POD

Also, FYI "consumer industries" do not just appear if Russia becomes more democratic. Prior to Stalin's reign (which was also the most oppressive form of communism ever employed in the USSR) Russia was, going back all the way through the Tsars an economic backwater. It was mostly agrarian and with very low levels of education and hence very low amounts of human capital. Outside of the big city centers, like in Moscow it was a really backwards country, and it really didn't have the technology or the trained labour force outside of a few key urban cities to convert Russia as a whole into a developed country that could even come close to per-capita parity with the west (The well educated Russian population came in later generations, by which time the economy killing brand of communism in the USSR was already entrenched). The Russians really didn't go through the industrial revolution until well into the 20th century when the Stalinists built the huge industrial system in the 1920s-40s through essentially working people to death to build the Soviet Union into a heavy industries titan (and pretty much nothing else during that time). Without that industrial capacity there really isn't away to produce a consumer society, and since Russian's industrial revolution was guided by a tyrant looking to build an empire rather than consumer forces and a rising middle class (eg. as in the case of America in the late 19th century) that industrial revolution was largely focused on heavy industries, which as I said before offers only an increasingly limited return on global power, unless you are willing to use your superior military to conquer your neighbours and competitors. So simply saying "Just have the USSR adopt more consumer industries" is a lot easier said then done.

In effect the Russians already had a massive long term disadvantage handed down from the days of the repression and really feudal rule of the Tsars, and communism, while it led to rapid industrialization, really added to this gap with the West long term.

Oh and having 20 million of your people killed and many of your cities razed to the ground by an army of Germans bent on exterminating the Slavic race from the face of the Earth makes it a teensy harder to build a liberal economy.
 
Post 1960, I think the best likely PoD is one that ensures that Kosygin succeeds in his power-struggle with Brezhnev, meaning that he is the top man by the early 70s.

Kosygin's ideas would not produce an ideal Soviet Union, but I do think the economy would do a little better under his policies and the planners and party would be more open to new ideas once the oil crisis started to cause the system real problems in the 80s. Also, without Brezhnev's extraordinary (and corrosive) corruption, particularly its height in the mid 70s to early 80s, the whole system would be much more honest, meaning more efficiency, more popular legitimacy and more ability to change in the face of challenges.

For a later PoD, Andropov living longer and enjoying good health during that longer life, would also help reforming the USSR. Gorbachev really undermined Andropov's efforts to clean up corruption in the system due to his perceived need to play political games with the anti-corruption drive to secure his power base. As such, not having a more honest bureaucracy and Party when Gorbachev began his radical reformist stage really damaged the chances of those reforms succeeding.

Alternatively, a PoD could be Brezhnev dies early, leading to Andropov succeeding him sooner - less corruption AND Andropov gets more years at the top to get things done.

fasquardon
 
Post 1960, I think the best likely PoD is one that ensures that Kosygin succeeds in his power-struggle with Brezhnev, meaning that he is the top man by the early 70s.

Kosygin's ideas would not produce an ideal Soviet Union, but I do think the economy would do a little better under his policies and the planners and party would be more open to new ideas once the oil crisis started to cause the system real problems in the 80s. Also, without Brezhnev's extraordinary (and corrosive) corruption, particularly its height in the mid 70s to early 80s, the whole system would be much more honest, meaning more efficiency, more popular legitimacy and more ability to change in the face of challenges.

For a later PoD, Andropov living longer and enjoying good health during that longer life, would also help reforming the USSR. Gorbachev really undermined Andropov's efforts to clean up corruption in the system due to his perceived need to play political games with the anti-corruption drive to secure his power base. As such, not having a more honest bureaucracy and Party when Gorbachev began his radical reformist stage really damaged the chances of those reforms succeeding.

Alternatively, a PoD could be Brezhnev dies early, leading to Andropov succeeding him sooner - less corruption AND Andropov gets more years at the top to get things done.

fasquardon

The really challenge from the OP is to liberalize the USSR AND keep it at "on the peak of its power". Honestly, cutting down on corruption is like trying to fix the gushing stab wound that is bleeding the soviet system dry with a band-aid. It will never be enough for the Russians to ever catch up to the west economically, which is long term the only way they can maintain there power. Considering that Soviet power was based on dominating the soviet republics and the Warsaw Pact through threat of force liberalizing the USSR may actually hurt its decline even more by bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union as it did between the mid 80s and early 90s.
 
The really challenge from the OP is to liberalize the USSR AND keep it at "on the peak of its power". Honestly, cutting down on corruption is like trying to fix the gushing stab wound that is bleeding the soviet system dry with a band-aid. It will never be enough for the Russians to ever catch up to the west economically, which is long term the only way they can maintain there power. Considering that Soviet power was based on dominating the soviet republics and the Warsaw Pact through threat of force liberalizing the USSR may actually hurt its decline even more by bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union as it did between the mid 80s and early 90s.

You seem to be getting a bit reductionist about the issue, NamelesStatistic. I think most people are in agreement that at the very least the Stalinist model of development isn't sustainable. The fact of the matter is that, as nonchalant about human life as programmes like Stalin's industrialisation and Mao's Great Leap Forward are, they have at their core an economic logic: to produce a) capital goods (think tractors, which are then used for improving agricultural efficiency and thus value production) or b) for export, in order to gain foreign currency, which is then reinvested as capital. In these systems, the huge difference in the macro-macroeconomy is the state's place as the arbiter of capital allocation.

Just like how Western capitalism has gone through stages from a heavy-industry-based model to a consumer industry one, to service/information-based economics; Communism also needed to go through stages. The biggest problem for the USSR was that they didn't get to go through these changes. After Stalin, Khrushchev began to work towards broadening the base of the economy and starting to increase consumer goods production (although, with his background as a Ukrainian coalminer and having gone through the tooth-and-nail struggle that was the Great Patriotic War, he was always wary of making Soviet peoples too "decadent"). After Khrushchev, Brezhnev essentially cut this short. I disregard any argument that the structures that Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union continued, unassailable, until perestroika and glasnost. With Kosygin succeeding Khrushchev instead of Brezhnev, we wouldn't see the same black hole spending on the military and would see a more rational and sophisticated development of the Soviet economy. The options weren't as simple as "staying Stalinist" or "going Chinese" (which, as other posters in other threads have pointed out, wasn't possible for the Russians).
 
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=294203

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=280530

Just have the USSR adopt more consumer industries, adopt worker's self management and a cybernetic semi-decentralized econony and have a bit (just a bit) of democratization in the USSR and turn it into a federal state, with parties besides the CPSU allowed to form but not centre-right to right-wing parties, just center to communist parties, voila!


P.S.Butterfly the 1950s Eastern Bloc Unrests (In the GDR) by not raising quotas on production, or solve them in a good way for Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.. Have Khrushchev fix his Virgin Lands Campaign like what Hrvatskiwi said in Stars and Sickles, and also not to focus on the arms race but the space race. Also, you gotta have to butterfly Tito, Hoxha, Mao, the Kim Family, the Cuban Missile Crisis, have Finland and Greece go communist and they win in Afghanistan with only limited support for the government there to give them a sense of security.

Also nice to see some free promotion! :p thanks EcoBOOM!
 
You seem to be getting a bit reductionist about the issue, NamelesStatistic. I think most people are in agreement that at the very least the Stalinist model of development isn't sustainable. The fact of the matter is that, as nonchalant about human life as programmes like Stalin's industrialisation and Mao's Great Leap Forward are, they have at their core an economic logic: to produce a) capital goods (think tractors, which are then used for improving agricultural efficiency and thus value production) or b) for export, in order to gain foreign currency, which is then reinvested as capital. In these systems, the huge difference in the macro-macroeconomy is the state's place as the arbiter of capital allocation.

Just like how Western capitalism has gone through stages from a heavy-industry-based model to a consumer industry one, to service/information-based economics; Communism also needed to go through stages. The biggest problem for the USSR was that they didn't get to go through these changes. After Stalin, Khrushchev began to work towards broadening the base of the economy and starting to increase consumer goods production (although, with his background as a Ukrainian coalminer and having gone through the tooth-and-nail struggle that was the Great Patriotic War, he was always wary of making Soviet peoples too "decadent"). After Khrushchev, Brezhnev essentially cut this short. I disregard any argument that the structures that Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union continued, unassailable, until perestroika and glasnost. With Kosygin succeeding Khrushchev instead of Brezhnev, we wouldn't see the same black hole spending on the military and would see a more rational and sophisticated development of the Soviet economy. The options weren't as simple as "staying Stalinist" or "going Chinese" (which, as other posters in other threads have pointed out, wasn't possible for the Russians).

The difference was that Western industrialism wasn't specifically designed by a small group autocrats with an enormous emphasis on defense production. The industrial revolution in countries like the UK and US were primarily market driven, they weren't a series of imposed "Economic Plans". This is a bit of a simplification, I admit but in general, in Europe and America, the merchant class used industrial technologies to create mass the production of cheap consumer goods, which the new rising middle class could now afford (because they were no longer just struggling to afford the bare necessities), this internal consumption fueled the economies of these countries, and it is something the Soviet Union never really achieved and it really hurt them economically. The Soviet State itself may have gained wealth, but there was never that large affluent middle class in Russia that is really necessary to preserve Soviet power long term and allow it to compete with the West in anything but raw military might. Furthermore as I stated before this competition with the West further exacerbated this problem as to match the West militarily the Soviets had to focus even more of their small, inefficient economy on heavy industry to the detriment of all other areas, which as I said before is a recipe for increasing limited returns.

As to the focus of Stalin's macro-economic plan: well yes, modernizing (to a degree) the Russian farming system is a good thing, but building an economy on the export of primary resources is not a good strategy for building a wealthy economy, especially when it has an extreme lack of diversity (this is still something Russia struggles with today, though to a much lesser degree). Furthermore, you have to remember that the Soviet economy was NOT an export based economy, at least not for the first few decades, it was a very insular economy (one of the reasons the Russians were much less affected by the Great depression). Even later was never like 1980s-1990s China where it manufactured huge amounts of product for export, with the notable exception of its arms industry. Also attributing China's economic rise to Mao's policies is totally incorrect. Under Mao, China remained deeply impoverished, the much more recent growth of China is largely due to abandoning Mao's economy stifling Soviet-style and can be traced to Deng Xiaoping's and his ilk's open market reforms (which are the antithesis of the soviet economic reforms and caused Deng to be "purged" twice during China "Cultural Revolution").

A big difference between the Soviets and the Chinese is that the Chinese never suffered the degree of internal fractures the Soviet Union had (Tibet as one of a few notable exceptions), nor was their power dependent on keeping a series of satellite states in their orbit essentially under threat of force and so unlike China, The Soviet Union was much more prone to collapse when it did eventually try to reform. The Soviet Union was really always more of a Russian empire with a core state of Russia ruling its surrounding states, whereas the China is a unitary state, which makes the system lot less fragile and thus more able to change without risking collapse.

So contrary to what you claim, i never suggested it was as simple as "going Chinese" as the underlying conditions of the two countries were very different, even if in 1960 they both had the same style of government. My real claim is in fact, that The USSR really had no chance of ever maintaining its power long term because it just could never economically come close to the West, because they were already massively behind and the system they had in place stifled future growth (and unfortunately since the fragile structure of Russian power was built on this system attempting to change it substantially risked collapse, which is exactly what happened in OTL) and it couldn't rely on an enormously larger population then its rivals to make up the difference (which is still the main reason why China is an economic powerhouse, even if each Chinese person is one quarter as productive as an American, China will still have a larger economy then the US, if China didn't have such a massive numerical advantage, we really wouldn't be talking about it as a potential Superpower anytime soon).
 
You seem to be getting a bit reductionist about the issue, NamelesStatistic. I think most people are in agreement that at the very least the Stalinist model of development isn't sustainable. The fact of the matter is that, as nonchalant about human life as programmes like Stalin's industrialisation and Mao's Great Leap Forward are, they have at their core an economic logic: to produce a) capital goods (think tractors, which are then used for improving agricultural efficiency and thus value production) or b) for export, in order to gain foreign currency, which is then reinvested as capital. In these systems, the huge difference in the macro-macroeconomy is the state's place as the arbiter of capital allocation.

Just like how Western capitalism has gone through stages from a heavy-industry-based model to a consumer industry one, to service/information-based economics; Communism also needed to go through stages. The biggest problem for the USSR was that they didn't get to go through these changes. After Stalin, Khrushchev began to work towards broadening the base of the economy and starting to increase consumer goods production (although, with his background as a Ukrainian coalminer and having gone through the tooth-and-nail struggle that was the Great Patriotic War, he was always wary of making Soviet peoples too "decadent"). After Khrushchev, Brezhnev essentially cut this short. I disregard any argument that the structures that Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union continued, unassailable, until perestroika and glasnost. With Kosygin succeeding Khrushchev instead of Brezhnev, we wouldn't see the same black hole spending on the military and would see a more rational and sophisticated development of the Soviet economy. The options weren't as simple as "staying Stalinist" or "going Chinese" (which, as other posters in other threads have pointed out, wasn't possible for the Russians).

I've read, I think it was Dobrynin's memoirs, that Kosygin didnt want the top spot. Further, George Arbatov suggests that all of them were of mediocre abilities, including Kosygin, and that anyone with any abilities was wiped out by Stalin or so sufficiently scarred as to be afraid to propose anything ambitious.

As to making the shift to a consumer economy, a centrally planned economy is inherently disadvantaged in making this transition. Its impossible for one person to anticipate the fickleness of 200 million consumers. They end up building too many things that nobody wants and not enough of what others want. It happens in an capitalist economy but with decentralized participants, it can more rapidly adapt to consumer wants.
 
Post 1960, I think the best likely PoD is one that ensures that Kosygin succeeds in his power-struggle with Brezhnev, meaning that he is the top man by the early 70s.

Kosygin's ideas would not produce an ideal Soviet Union, but I do think the economy would do a little better under his policies and the planners and party would be more open to new ideas once the oil crisis started to cause the system real problems in the 80s. Also, without Brezhnev's extraordinary (and corrosive) corruption, particularly its height in the mid 70s to early 80s, the whole system would be much more honest, meaning more efficiency, more popular legitimacy and more ability to change in the face of challenges.

For a later PoD, Andropov living longer and enjoying good health during that longer life, would also help reforming the USSR. Gorbachev really undermined Andropov's efforts to clean up corruption in the system due to his perceived need to play political games with the anti-corruption drive to secure his power base. As such, not having a more honest bureaucracy and Party when Gorbachev began his radical reformist stage really damaged the chances of those reforms succeeding.

Alternatively, a PoD could be Brezhnev dies early, leading to Andropov succeeding him sooner - less corruption AND Andropov gets more years at the top to get things done.

fasquardon

See my points on Kosygin above.

As to Andropov, he couldnt succeed Brezhnev earlier. Every General Secretary was initially a second secretary on the Secretariat. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev all held the position. As second secretary on the Secretariat, the individual had enormous influence on the communist apparatus and the Politburo. Andropov didnt become second secretary until Suslov died and had to resign as head of the KGB to do so. If Brezhnev dies earlier its either Kirilenko or Chernenko.

Now Andropov living longer, that's an interesting POD.
 
I've read, I think it was Dobrynin's memoirs, that Kosygin didnt want the top spot. Further, George Arbatov suggests that all of them were of mediocre abilities, including Kosygin, and that anyone with any abilities was wiped out by Stalin or so sufficiently scarred as to be afraid to propose anything ambitious.

Kosygin at least seems to have wanted to be an equal or near equal. Certainly more power than was usual for someone who wasn't General Secretary.

And I'm not sure that being "mediocre" is the strike against him that you think... I think one of the things the USSR needed was someone who could introduce a little change into the system to prepare it for later, more radical change. As it was, Andropov might have been that man, had he lived longer, but he didn't get the chance, so the Soviet Union under Gorbachev tried to shift directly from outmoded forms of the planned economy AND a culture of habitual dishonesty AND a culture of corruption all in one desperate dash when none of the middle managers had the skillset to really imagine how anything could be different, let alone implament it.

So yes, Kosygin was not nearly as amazing as some of the rosier Western eulogies of him assume. He was a limited Soviet apparatchik just like the rest. But I think his ideas - less feeding the military industrial complex, more decentralization of planning, more emphasis on consumer goods and at least some idea that enterprises needed to think about quality more than they were - combined with the lack of corrosive corruption as Brezhnev had - could result in a Soviet Union that was just a bit better prepared for the larger changes that would need to happen in the 80s and 90s.

Of course, if Kosygin gets too much power too soon, he could well be thrown out of power or inadvertently destroy the Soviet Union by not cracking down on Czechoslovakia, resulting in a wave of liberalization that smashes the Warsaw pact regimes and fatally discredits the Soviet regime almost 20 years early...

Or maybe I am overestimating what the Prague Spring could do if it had been allowed to grow and spread... I've read some compelling cases for it being a deadly threat to the Soviets though.

Now Andropov living longer, that's an interesting POD.

It is. The more I read into the time and the man himself, the more intriguing I find it. I may write a TL where the man has better kidneys one day... If he lived as long as Brezhnev, he'd die in 1989 - enough time to perhaps prepare the ground for a successor to initiate real reforms in the 90s... Also enough time to allow the Cold War to get alot colder though.

fasquardon
 
The difference was that Western industrialism wasn't specifically designed by a small group autocrats with an enormous emphasis on defense production. The industrial revolution in countries like the UK and US were primarily market driven, they weren't a series of imposed "Economic Plans". This is a bit of a simplification, I admit but in general, in Europe and America, the merchant class used industrial technologies to create mass the production of cheap consumer goods, which the new rising middle class could now afford (because they were no longer just struggling to afford the bare necessities), this internal consumption fueled the economies of these countries, and it is something the Soviet Union never really achieved and it really hurt them economically. The Soviet State itself may have gained wealth, but there was never that large affluent middle class in Russia that is really necessary to preserve Soviet power long term and allow it to compete with the West in anything but raw military might. Furthermore as I stated before this competition with the West further exacerbated this problem as to match the West militarily the Soviets had to focus even more of their small, inefficient economy on heavy industry to the detriment of all other areas, which as I said before is a recipe for increasing limited returns.

The only real difference between the organic development of industrialisation and the rapid industrialisation of the Stalinist model is that the latter has less free-flowing capital (rather being directed into certain projects) which is partially counteracted by more clear direction of projects (theoretically). I would agree with you, however, in that Soviet military spending was a capital-sink and that the USSR never achieved the sizeable and affluent middle class necessary. I think my view on that would differ in yours in that I recognise that there was an emerging middle class, merely that its emergence was retarded by Brezhnev's economic policies.

As to the focus of Stalin's macro-economic plan: well yes, modernizing (to a degree) the Russian farming system is a good thing, but building an economy on the export of primary resources is not a good strategy for building a wealthy economy, especially when it has an extreme lack of diversity (this is still something Russia struggles with today, though to a much lesser degree). Furthermore, you have to remember that the Soviet economy was NOT an export based economy, at least not for the first few decades, it was a very insular economy (one of the reasons the Russians were much less affected by the Great Depression). Even later was never like 1980s-1990s China where it manufactured huge amounts of product for export, with the notable exception of its arms industry. Also attributing China's economic rise to Mao's policies is totally incorrect. Under Mao, China remained deeply impoverished, the much more recent growth of China is largely due to abandoning Mao's economy stifling Soviet-style and can be traced to Deng Xiaoping's and his ilk's open market reforms (which are the antithesis of the soviet economic reforms and caused Deng to be "purged" twice during China "Cultural Revolution").

By the 1960s, the Soviet Union was definitely an export-based economy. The amount of industrial goods, expertise, financing and arms deals it did were enormous. And I think you misunderstood me about Mao's policies, as I didn't argue they laid the foundation of China's current relative success. Rather I was stating that there was a somewhat valid underlying logic, even though the execution was tragic in its stupidity and short-sightedness.

A big difference between the Soviets and the Chinese is that the Chinese never suffered the degree of internal fractures the Soviet Union had (Tibet as one of a few notable exceptions), nor was their power dependent on keeping a series of satellite states in their orbit essentially under threat of force and so unlike China, The Soviet Union was much more prone to collapse when it did eventually try to reform. The Soviet Union was really always more of a Russian empire with a core state of Russia ruling its surrounding states, whereas the China is a unitary state, which makes the system lot less fragile and thus more able to change without risking collapse.

I'd dispute this. Aside from Tibet, there is also East Turkestan/Xinjiang. Further, China has thrown weight around against India and Vietnam on various occasions, creating enemies which need to be accounted for in Chinese strategy. I don't think that China being less prone to collapse is due to having a more dominant single ethnic group (the Han), but that the Chinese have a very different attitude towards authority. The Chinese Communist Party was just as likely to collapse as the Soviet one, even if the borders may have stayed at least similar, if not the same. I'm talking about the collapse of a social organisation or structure, not of the territorial extent of a country.

So contrary to what you claim, i never suggested it was as simple as "going Chinese" as the underlying conditions of the two countries were very different, even if in 1960 they both had the same style of government. My real claim is in fact, that The USSR really had no chance of ever maintaining its power long term because it just could never economically come close to the West, because they were already massively behind and the system they had in place stifled future growth (and unfortunately since the fragile structure of Russian power was built on this system attempting to change it substantially risked collapse, which is exactly what happened in OTL) and it couldn't rely on an enormously larger population then its rivals to make up the difference (which is still the main reason why China is an economic powerhouse, even if each Chinese person is one quarter as productive as an American, China will still have a larger economy then the US, if China didn't have such a massive numerical advantage, we really wouldn't be talking about it as a potential Superpower anytime soon).

My point was essentially that Communism has the ability to reform itself, under the right leaders, in the Soviet Union and maintain a feasible model of alternative economic development. Often a reason Communist countries were seen as lagging behind is that the Western economic matrices used to measure success were heavily weighted towards things like GDP, which aren't capable of telling you much about an economy. I'm not disputing that Westerners had greater access in general to a greater number of material products, I'm just saying that until the Brezhnev-era stagnation, the USSR wasn't lagging as far behind as some people, like yourself, suggest.
 
The only real difference between the organic development of industrialisation and the rapid industrialisation of the Stalinist model is that the latter has less free-flowing capital (rather being directed into certain projects) which is partially counteracted by more clear direction of projects (theoretically). I would agree with you, however, in that Soviet military spending was a capital-sink and that the USSR never achieved the sizeable and affluent middle class necessary. I think my view on that would differ in yours in that I recognise that there was an emerging middle class, merely that its emergence was retarded by Brezhnev's economic policies.



By the 1960s, the Soviet Union was definitely an export-based economy. The amount of industrial goods, expertise, financing and arms deals it did were enormous. And I think you misunderstood me about Mao's policies, as I didn't argue they laid the foundation of China's current relative success. Rather I was stating that there was a somewhat valid underlying logic, even though the execution was tragic in its stupidity and short-sightedness.



I'd dispute this. Aside from Tibet, there is also East Turkestan/Xinjiang. Further, China has thrown weight around against India and Vietnam on various occasions, creating enemies which need to be accounted for in Chinese strategy. I don't think that China being less prone to collapse is due to having a more dominant single ethnic group (the Han), but that the Chinese have a very different attitude towards authority. The Chinese Communist Party was just as likely to collapse as the Soviet one, even if the borders may have stayed at least similar, if not the same. I'm talking about the collapse of a social organisation or structure, not of the territorial extent of a country.



My point was essentially that Communism has the ability to reform itself, under the right leaders, in the Soviet Union and maintain a feasible model of alternative economic development. Often a reason Communist countries were seen as lagging behind is that the Western economic matrices used to measure success were heavily weighted towards things like GDP, which aren't capable of telling you much about an economy. I'm not disputing that Westerners had greater access in general to a greater number of material products, I'm just saying that until the Brezhnev-era stagnation, the USSR wasn't lagging as far behind as some people, like yourself, suggest.


The problem with the rapid industrialization of the Stalinist model is that it is only really industrialization in a few key areas (eg. military, steel production, grand engineering projects) and this leaves big chunks of the rest of the national economy at per-industrial states. This specific industrialization based on "Plans" is fine for being able to build a few things in large numbers (eg. tanks) but it doesn't foster the creation of that mercantile middle class which is necessary to create a modern economy. Hence this is why Russia could build sophisticated ICBMs but why its shops were largely bare and many of its people still lived with on the minimum necessities.

I can understand your point about some exports coming from the USSR, but the diversity of what the Soviets exported was extremely limited relative to the other superpower of the time, the US and even the smaller Euopean economies. Its main exports raw resources and military machinery. America by contrast produced and exported every product under the sun and in quantities that were orders of magnitudes more than the USSR. It should also be noted that the Soviet export system was an artificially created system designed to favor the trade of goods between the Soviet Union and its vassal states and this artificially helped inflate Soviet trade, because it prevented foreign made goods from competing with Soviet goods in an open market, which again hurts the Soviets long term because it isolates them from being major players on the World market. Again, the only places you see the Soviets coming anywhere close to competing with the West on a per capita trade bases on the international market is in the export of weapons. The Chinese export system was a very different model (again due to the patently un-communist market reforms) based on trading on the free market and using cheap labour and mass production to undercut foreign rivals. This too is changing as China is now progressively switching to a consumer based economy as its middle class grows and it has a larger internal market. Again this sort of free market enterprise project is the antithesis of the Marxist-Leninist economic system which both the USSR and PRC government had in 1960. Frankly modern China simply isn't a Soviet style communist country anymore, precisely because its leaders realized that in the long run it would doom them economically.

My point, which is where I believe our key disagreement lies, is that for the Soviets to reform to the degree necessary for creating an economy in 1960 that could hope to hold its own in the world system (and thus preserve peak Soviet power) you essentially have to reform away pretty much all aspects of a Marxist-Leninist Communist-style economy. It doesn't have to be democratic (there are plenty of non-democratic but economically successful countries out there) but it cant exist as a Soviet planned economy, it just wont prosper long term.

As to the China as a unified state, you have to remember that China is an ancient civilization, that has been populated by a Han people for millennia. Importantly, the billion people in China all see themselves as one group. The soviet Union was a short-lived empire which was really Russia surrounded by a bunch or "republics" it dominated but had little in common with (similar in many ways to the European empires, but on land rather than by sea). Simply put this makes the Soviet Union a lot more fragile and prone to collapse under stress then China. On this point if you disagree with me I would point you to the work of people like Martin Jaques who talk extensively on this subject. Here is an interesting link you might like to watch, he is reaching a bit on some of his conclusions in my opinion but it is certainly pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G1EyvRZmOs
 
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Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
If I understand that right, you need a POD in 1917 or 1918 to change the nature of the Soviet regime completly and thus having socialism in the east survive?

What POD do you think of?
 
You have to end the Cold War and somehow make the Soviet Union a relevant and viable competitor in an area that isn't related to warfare or revolution. As others have mentioned, the USSR was slowly strangled to death by the Western bloc's superior economic system. There two factors to this: one external, the other internal, and both results of the Cold War framework.

Problems

The external factor is that of the strength levied against the USSR from the West and China. The Soviet Union was seen as an aggressive empire keen on expanding its borders through violence and revolutionary subversion. This view is vindicated by Soviet (and in fact modern Russian) behavior vis-a-vis bordering states, most notably the shackling of the Eastern Bloc via the Warsaw Pact, and subversive activities in the 3rd World.

But all this, rather than being the reflection of Soviet strength, is actually a reaction to its own inherent weaknesses. Geographically, the USSR was no match for the West and China, which between them controlled pretty much the whole of the worthwhile world. Additionally, the Soviets were materially and demographically weakened by World War 2, further undermining their competitive value.

The internal factor is the way the Soviet leadership saw itself, its people, and the outside world. Being communists, Soviet leaders, at least on paper, felt it necessary to adhere to a few tenets. First and foremost, in 1960 they still believed in the vitality of their own economic system as an alternative to the capitalist one. Secondly, they also found it imperative to maintain the Marxist revolutionary ideals, which impacted their domestic and international condition.

While the practice of these ideals on the international stage could and was manifested as the "fraternal" relations with Eastern European countries and 3rd world movements, it also fit into the defensive mindset of the USSR leadership. On the internal front, the Soviet leadership ruled through the Communist Party and thus felt the need to keep the populace faithful to communism as such.

The result of these two factors in concert meant that the Soviet Union in 1960 was firstly stuck in an unenviable defensive position, and secondly that its leaders somehow believed or felt pressured to believe that this situation could be remedied through maintenance of Communist ideals and the economic system.

Solutions

Delivering the USSR from the trap of these two factors—that is, making the USSR not a categorical enemy of the West, and freeing its leaders from the ossified thinking of Marxism—is difficult but it probably can be done with the right luck and skill. First you have to make the USSR recognize that it is never going to be able to maintain military superiority or even parity with the West. Second you have to have the Soviets abandon Marxism in all but name, similar to what China did.

The first goal is very dangerous but not so hard. Given the PoD is 1960 or later, we can have the USSR suffer some sort of horrific setback, Cuba being a possibility. Let's say the US moves to remove Castro (and the Soviet weapons) in during the Crisis; I personally doubt the Soviets would let themselves get destroyed over Cuba. This embarrassment would not only remove Khrushchev from power; it could firmly show the USSR that military competition with the West is neither sane nor winnable.

Following this, the USSR leadership itself debates the utility of an economic system that has produced so much inefficiency and weakness. The USSR might give up the ideal of world revolution completely, allowing Eastern Europe to Finlandize (as a pilot project) in return for remaining under the Soviet military system. A Tiananmen-style protest for democracy is crushed brutally, and is then ignored as the Soviets allow Eastern Europe to function as "special economic zones." The USSR props the newly-capitalist nations such as East Germany, Poland, or Czechoslovakia up with cheap oil and raw materials, allowing them to compete with superior Western products.

Later, around 1970, a military confrontation with China turns into a regional war that the USSR wins, restoring faith in the leadership, the strength of the military establishment, and possibly retarding the development of China as a major power.

Between 1970 and 1990, the USSR emphasizes "peaceful development." Political reforms are off the table, at least not for the Soviet Union itself; the main thing is to make money. The West, seeing the economic reforms in Eastern Europe and the clobbering of China at the height of its own ideological madness, is satisfied and no longer considers the Soviets to be an existential threat. NATO remains, as does the Warsaw Pact, but they are simply there to "keep the peace"—ideology has taken a strictly back seat to business.

By TTL's 1980, the USSR survives off of oil and raw mineral exports, but the Soviet elite also wants in on the free market action, so they start using the state-run enterprises in collusion with first Eastern European, then homegrown private firms to engage in all kinds of corrupt business. The more politically open Eastern Europeans protest, but the threat of the Warsaw Pact and their economic comfort precludes any serious unrest.

By 1990, Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev are major centers of Soviet market investment, and the rest of the country languishes—they are not profitable. Soviet citizens emigrate from stagnating Stalin-era towns to the modern cities and Eastern Europe, which is forced to accept the influx. Ideologically, Communism is all but dead; what has replaced it is Great Russian nationalism under a crude mask of pan-Slavic brotherhood. Religion is still heavily influenced by the state but there is no longer any official stigma against faith.

In the 1990s things start to get dicey in Russia other parts of the USSR. Intense corruption backed by the Party structure causes popular unrest; while criticizing the Party itself is taboo, it is common for officials and state services to be demonized in the eyes of the public. Millions of less-fortunate Soviets in the left-behind Siberian rustbelt, as well as the actual political dissidents who couldn't be either bought off or eliminated, are a growing threat to the leadership as it becomes clear that the authoritarian state-run capitalist system has its own problems (mostly corruption and frequent lawlessness).

Circa 1995 there is some sort of crisis (could be an alternate Chernobyl or some sort of political fight, think Xi Jinping versus the corrupt officials of OTL China) that undermines the one-party system of the USSR. At the same time, ethnic tensions arise, though they are less pronounced or dangerous since the USSR has been spending about two decades pushing a very pan-Slavic platform that did not exist IOTL.

As the combination of these factors threatens collapse, a coalition of Party "reformers" and the Soviet military and police establishment launch a coup that overthrows the Communist Party and co-opts its authoritarian structure while crushing any hope of independence for uppity regions. This authoritarian monopoly is broken up to allow for multiparty politics while preserving the remnants of the CPSU as a default "big tent" party that panders to "all true Slavs and Russians". While true opposition parties now exist, the former CPSU is still indisputably the largest and leads the nation. Its platform is basically a nationalist welfare state. However, it will never hold the same political monopoly that the CPSU enjoyed; this fact, coupled with popular demand, leads to a vastly more transparent Soviet government. As a result, it is less wasteful, less prone to brazenly violating Soviet law, and longer-lived.
 
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If I understand that right, you need a POD in 1917 or 1918 to change the nature of the Soviet regime completly and thus having socialism in the east survive?

What POD do you think of?

Stalin chokes on a meatball in 1928 or 1929 might not be too late.

The hard part though is accounting for WWII. Napolean IV has an ongoing TL with Stalin sent packing. Havent caught up so not sure where he is with it.
 
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