A most violent Soviet collapse?

Angel Heart · Aug 28, 2009

First of all: For God's sake no! I'm not anti-Russian and I think that we are lucky that the collapse of the USSR didn't escalate more in OTL. So I hope there won't be any misunderstandings.

Now to topic: I'm trying to make a paulsible scenario where the USSR collapsed more violently. Sure, there were wars IOTL in the Caucasus and Tajikistan, but what about the rest of the former USSR? A (civil) war in the Ferghana valley seems plausible to me and what about Kazakhstan where more then one third of the population consist of ethnic Russians? Could this lead also towards civil war? And do you think that there might be some potential for a conflict between Russia and Ukraine? And what about the Baltic states? And is there a possibility to devastate Russia itself let 's say by civil wars (let 's say the new Yeltsin regime is weak and Russia is de facto governed by local warlords who were former Soviet generals and so on) anarchy or/and even collapse? The goal is to make Russia and most of the ex-Soviet republics look like Bosnia during the early and mid 90s.
What would be the PoD(s) before to make this all possible? The Russians doing something (more) nasty towards other ethnic groups? A larger populated USSR? A lower HDI? My gut feeling tells me that the answer might be by worsening the economic situation.

And one rule: No nuclear holocaust!!!

Once again: I'm not a sadist who enjoys genocide and ethnic cleansings, God forbid!!! I'm working on a overall scenario where the world in the near future is a very nasty place to live in and I've decided to start by tearing apart the USSR, so don't feel offended.

Berra · Aug 29, 2009

I think a "strong leader" is the best bet.

Angel Heart · Aug 29, 2009

Berra said:
I think a "strong leader" is the best bet.

Something like a Soviet Milošević?

IMP CAES AVG · Aug 29, 2009

A successful August Coup leading to clashes between the pro-independence republics and the central government, which eventually escalates to free for all civil war?

Sovietdolphin · Aug 29, 2009

Ai think the best bet for it would be for it to not collapse at all - at least for a bit. Whatever government you get - maybe the August coup leaders - isn't going to let the Soviet Union fall apart, and they defend the borders, repress every uprising, scorn the West, etc. Take power from the Communist Party apparatchiks and put it all with the Red Army. Let 'em run wild. Even better, get Western countries to think that a Soviet collapse is the worst thing imaginable, and get them to send aid to Moscow to keep the regime running artificially. If the Soviets last to 1996, that'll be hell. Keep 'em going 'til the new millenium for something real fun.

Surround the Soviet Union with very anti-refugee governments. Most of them are probably that way already, but the Finns might need some anti-Russian crazy folks in power, or at least in positions of some influence.

It'll actually be better for the whole world, most likely, when the regime collapses. At least people will be able to move on.

CanadianGoose · Aug 31, 2009

Angel Heart said:
Now to topic: I'm trying to make a paulsible scenario where the USSR collapsed more violently.

There're basically two ways you can go:
1. Radicalize old tribal conflicts in Central Asia and Caucasus and make "Slavic Majority" (trio of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians) adopt "hands off" approach, something along the lines of "let those savages to fight it out among themselves". I don't think it would create a truly bloody mess, as Russia proper (well, with possible exception of the Northern Caucasus), Ukraine and Belarus would remain relatively stable and Baltics would be what Slavs would want them to be (IOTL they were being let go, ITTL they might be kept or being let go, but it doesn't change a thing).
2. Make Slavs to fight it out between themselves and, most of all, do some "Russians on Russians" thing (as soon as Russians act as a whole, they can just cleanse Ukrainians as cruelly as they want, numbers are tough thing to overcome). It isn't easy, but not impossible. You might want to look at early Yeltsin's "Take as much independence as you want" slogan and short-lived OTL monsters of "Ural Republic" and such for inspiration. Economy goes down, people gets more and more miserable, market regionalizes more and more, and at some point it blows up. Once bullets start flying, there's no end of tit-for-tat bloodshed.

Angel Heart · Aug 31, 2009

Okay guys, after reading your posts I'll try to make a scenario and you can tell me the flaws.

80s
Let 's start with the year 1984 with the death of Yuri Andropov. After Andropov bites the dust we have an earlier "August Coup" where a Marshal, I'll choose Sergey Akhromeyev, gains power and turns the USSR into a military junta (preventing Chernenko from gaining power will butterfly Gorbachev).
In order to go toe-to-toe with the "reviving" United States which was recovering from Carters failures, Akhromeyev developes a Soviet "Songun-Policy" (the "military first" thing from today's OTL North Korea) to modernize the Red Army and turn it even bigger. Somewhere I read that the Red Army had 4.5 million acitive troopers in 1989, so having the same troops per capita level als OTL DPRK, the USSR would have a total over 73 million military personel by the late 80s. Maintaining such a huge ass army would even be a challenge for the US, so Akhromeyev is maintaining the Red Army at the expense of the Soviet population. We have an even more dramatic shortages of consumer goods and to make matters even worse: famines at the scale of Holodomor are occuring once again. The USSR bans emigration and is holding her population more or less as a hostage, the Cold War still continues even in the 90s like the Soviet occupation if Aghanistan and civil and ethnic uprisings are squashed brutally.

90s
Meanwhile, matters are getting even worse. The HDI is falling and the once mighty Soviet Empire is becomming more and more a Third World country. Various generals are plotting while various Soviet Republics are longing to get out. Being cannibalized by the debts and the hyper inflation, the Soviet economy collapes and as a result Akhromeyev is removed.

either he dies and the USSR falls apart
or we have an alternate August Coup led by Yeltsin which succeds and the USSR dissolves

Like in OTL we have wars in Tajikistan, Chechnya, Georgia and the war between Armenia and Azerbajan. With the USSR gone and weak governments ruling the successor states, everyone tries to grab what he can. With this we could radicalize the hostility between Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Kyrgiz. The Russian diaspora in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Baltic states could try to split of and connect themselves with the motherland, more or less what the Serbs tried during the wars in Yugoslavia. We might also se a Srebrenica or even Rwanda style genocide against the Yakuts and the Meskhetian Turks in Uzbekistan and even more.
Letting Russia proper fall into anarchy doesn't seem to me that hard, espacially after reading this post by @Tom Kalbfus.

[...]Basically it destroys Capitalism and forces everyone to follow five year plans, when the government disintergrates and there is no five year plan forthcoming, what then does the public do?

The Soviets eliminated private property, so there is no longer anyt taboo about stealing another's property. The State used to own everything in this world, and with the state gone, your neighbors, car, his horse, or his wife is perfectly fair game, since the left over Soviet troops do nothing these days except plunder and pillage villages these days, as the state no longer supplies them, why not other former soviet citizens plunder their neighbors as well.[...]

So we can have Russia proper being de facto governed by local warlords fighting each other which would be similar more or less to OTL Africa, medival Europe or China in the 20s and 30s.

As for foreign intervention:
If Turkmenistan also falls into anarchy, I might see Iran trying to intervene and to revive Islam.
Sensing Russia's weakness, the Chinese might also send some "peacekeepers" into Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Japan might try to get the Kuriles back.
Europe will, as usually, do nothing significant due to being too decentralized, the same dilema we had with the Balkan wars.
I can see Turkey supporting Azerbaijan if things turn too nasty. But neither they, nor foreign Mujahedeen will support the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, since they would be fighting not only the Russians but each other.

I'm curious how the United States would react. Sending a UN peacekeeping mission to the former USSR would be tough since it is not a small country like Bosnia, Rwanda or Somalia, but a territorry larger then North America and is almost 3/4 the size of entire Africa. So the wars might end until everything is fought out due to the manpower shortage of the UN.

So, that was my try. Where are the flaws and is there anything significant I might have forgotten? :/

Typo · Aug 31, 2009

the USSR would have a total over 73 million military personel by the late 80s. Ummmm that's kinda ASBish. Unless you mean 7.3

ObssesedNuker · Aug 31, 2009

I think he is talking about Soviet Reserve personnel. Although, a good number of those reservists are going too wind-up wielding WW2-era submachine guns and walking into battle.

Angel Heart · Aug 31, 2009

Typo said:
the USSR would have a total over 73 million military personel by the late 80s. Ummmm that's kinda ASBish. Unless you mean 7.3

No, I mean 73 million. This includes active personel + reserve + paramilitary. So we can expect the USSR having lets say 13 million active troopers.
The other thing why I chose 73 million is if the USSR had the same total per capita rating as modern day North Korea (which is 249.3/1000 citizens). And as ObssesedNuker already said:

ObssesedNuker said:
[...]Although, a good number of those reservists are going too wind-up wielding WW2-era submachine guns and walking into battle.

A similar situation we have with today's North Korea. This ATL Red Army will be hopelessly outdated compared to the NATO, but as I remember Soviet doctrine correctly, the only thing that mattered was size.

CanadianGoose · Aug 31, 2009

Angel Heart said:
In order to go toe-to-toe with the "reviving" United States which was recovering from Carters failures, Akhromeyev developes a Soviet "Songun-Policy" (the "military first" thing from today's OTL North Korea) to modernize the Red Army and turn it even bigger. Somewhere I read that the Red Army had 4.5 million acitive troopers in 1989, so having the same troops per capita level als OTL DPRK, the USSR would have a total over 73 million military personel by the late 80s.

Very unlikely. Soviet leadership lived in "we're hopelessly outgunned" situation from very beginning, being forced to compete with infinitely more developed blocks. So quest for "asymmetric answer" became somewhat of second nature. This way of thinking kind of lessened in 70s (resulting in many costly "penis extender" undertakings), but it didn't go away completely (Soviet never built aircraft carriers, didn't they). And nukes had been a great helper. So, unless you describe what caused Soviet leadership to lose their faith in Nuclear so suddenly, I don't see the POD as real.

Angel Heart said:
Maintaining such a huge ass army would even be a challenge for the US, so Akhromeyev is maintaining the Red Army at the expense of the Soviet population.

Kill me if I'm wrong, but isn't modern-day NK army self-supporting, being an odd mix of conscript army and Trotskyite Labor Army, growing it's own rice and daikon. Assuming that brain bug caused Akhromeyev to swell SA that much, he would obviously pursue the same strategy.

Angel Heart said:
We have an even more dramatic shortages of consumer goods and to make matters even worse: famines at the scale of Holodomor are occuring once again.

Unlikely, unless you are insisting on keeping the Army at NK percentage but refusing to adopt NK model. USSR didn't have anything resembling hunger IOTL since at least 1950, so there's pretty serious cushion here.

Angel Heart said:
the Cold War still continues even in the 90s like the Soviet occupation if Aghanistan and civil and ethnic uprisings are squashed brutally.

This Soviet Union wouldn't have anything looking like "ethnic uprising" until all hell would break loose. Population would be terrified to no end.

Angel Heart said:
The Russian diaspora in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Baltic states could try to split of and connect themselves with the motherland, more or less what the Serbs tried during the wars in Yugoslavia. We might also se a Srebrenica or even Rwanda style genocide against the Yakuts and the Meskhetian Turks in Uzbekistan and even more.

OK, here is the thing. Unless USA are absolutely hell-bent on supplying and directly supporting every anti-Russian warlord out there (not that I believe that this side of one-sided support in civil war is above USA, they did in in Yugoslava IOTL), nothing can prevent Russian-dominated areas of Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Estonia to split from their central governments.

Angel Heart said:
Letting Russia proper fall into anarchy doesn't seem to me that hard, espacially after reading this post by @Tom Kalbfus.

I'm not convinced. Yes, government-sanctioned violence (read "police, courts and prisons") has a role in keeping people from getting at each other's throats. Is it so different in US, despite all that supposedly effective Christian teaching about tabus on thy neighbours' ass? So, if government in Moscow goes ballistic and removes itself from doing it's duty, why should people go ballistic too. In short, one needs Somalians to have Somalia, and Somalia is what you're aiming for here (and even in Somalia there's Somaliland). And you need much more than 20 short years to turn Russians into Somalians.

Angel Heart said:
So, that was my try. Where are the flaws and is there anything significant I might have forgotten? :/

You did not explain to me how are you going to get significantly more bloodshed than OTL.

Orville_third · Aug 31, 2009

Simple. Take OTL's conflict in Chechnya, add in OTL independence movements in Ngorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Dagestan (All of whom declared their indpenedence after the USSR fell), and add in a few more regions of the old USSR declaring independence. Add in the possible "ethnic cleansing" of Russians in Central Asia (In OTL, they are slowly leaving Central Asia), and there could be some more problems...

Angel Heart · Aug 31, 2009

Oh crap! I'm noticing that my creativity is now fading away. T____T

CanadianGoose said:
Very unlikely. Soviet leadership lived in "we're hopelessly outgunned" situation from very beginning, being forced to compete with infinitely more developed blocks. So quest for "asymmetric answer" became somewhat of second nature. This way of thinking kind of lessened in 70s (resulting in many costly "penis extender" undertakings), but it didn't go away completely (Soviet never built aircraft carriers, didn't they). And nukes had been a great helper. So, unless you describe what caused Soviet leadership to lose their faith in Nuclear so suddenly, I don't see the POD as real.

So they went from tanks to nukes. Maybe Akhromeyev's long term goal could be the invasion of Western Europe in order to exploit its recources (to me it doesn't make much sense nuking a country that you want to invade) as a last desperate attempt to prevent the Union from falling apart.

CanadianGoose said:
Kill me if I'm wrong, but isn't modern-day NK army self-supporting, being an odd mix of conscript army and Trotskyite Labor Army, growing it's own rice and daikon. Assuming that brain bug caused Akhromeyev to swell SA that much, he would obviously pursue the same strategy.

To be honest I didn't even know that the KPA is a "state within the state". :|

CanadianGoose said:
Unlikely, unless you are insisting on keeping the Army at NK percentage but refusing to adopt NK model. USSR didn't have anything resembling hunger IOTL since at least 1950, so there's pretty serious cushion here.

Maybe we should go even further back and make the Brezhnev regime fail even more. I don't know how the healthcare situation in the USSR was but weren't Soviet citizens more vulnerable to an epidemic then the Western hemisphere? Maybe we can have a wide spread of cereal diseases in the late 70s/early 80s which will destroy entire harvests.

CanadianGoose said:
This Soviet Union wouldn't have anything looking like "ethnic uprising" until all hell would break loose. Population would be terrified to no end.

Wasn't there a clash between Uzbeks and the Meskhetian Turks in 1989 and an uprising in Azerbaijan already in 1990? With a weak central government this shouldn't be too much ASBish.

CanadianGoose said:
OK, here is the thing. Unless USA are absolutely hell-bent on supplying and directly supporting every anti-Russian warlord out there (not that I believe that this side of one-sided support in civil war is above USA, they did in in Yugoslava IOTL), nothing can prevent Russian-dominated areas of Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Estonia to split from their central governments.

Yes, but I don't think that the Kazakhs, the Ukrainians and the Estonians would just give in, so we might see some bloodshed after all.

CanadianGoose said:
I'm not convinced. Yes, government-sanctioned violence (read "police, courts and prisons") has a role in keeping people from getting at each other's throats. Is it so different in US, despite all that supposedly effective Christian teaching about tabus on thy neighbours' ass? So, if government in Moscow goes ballistic and removes itself from doing it's duty, why should people go ballistic too. In short, one needs Somalians to have Somalia, and Somalia is what you're aiming for here (and even in Somalia there's Somaliland). And you need much more than 20 short years to turn Russians into Somalians.

I think I'm getting your point and I might even know the answer to that one too. One way would be to increase the Soviet population and we might have even more shortages. The other way might be by lowering the median age. I think that things would be different if the Soviet Union would have the same age structure as for example India or even Pakistan. For that we should go further back.

CanadianGoose said:
You did not explain to me how are you going to get significantly more bloodshed than OTL.

With the wars in the Baltics, Ukraine and central Asia and the anarchy in Russia proper this shouldn't be to much ASB. Are you familiar with the game Shattered Union? The logic would be similar: The EU occupied Washington D.C. would be the central government of the new Russian Federation which is recognized by the International Community, while everything outside Moscow is ruled by countless warlords and Republics and/or Oblast which declared themselves independent who want to grab as much as possible and some might even want to restore the USSR.

Berra · Sep 5, 2009

CanadianGoose said:
2. Make Slavs to fight it out between themselves and, most of all, do some "Russians on Russians" thing

Would that be centered around just local independence or would any issues lead to fighting?

(as soon as Russians act as a whole, they can just cleanse Ukrainians as cruelly as they want, numbers are tough thing to overcome). It isn't easy, but not impossible.

How would it not turn into a guerilla war, requering perhaps a 10:1 superiority in numbers? (Something the Soviet Union was unable to win in Afganistan.)

CanadianGoose · Sep 8, 2009

Angel Heart said:
So they went from tanks to nukes. Maybe Akhromeyev's long term goal could be the invasion of Western Europe in order to exploit its recources (to me it doesn't make much sense nuking a country that you want to invade) as a last desperate attempt to prevent the Union from falling apart.

Invading W. Europe for resources would be like invading Sahara for water, wouldn't it? The only resource you can successfully exploit there is industry and peoples' creativity, both are to be seriously damaged be an invasion.

Angel Heart said:
I don't know how the healthcare situation in the USSR was but weren't Soviet citizens more vulnerable to an epidemic then the Western hemisphere? Maybe we can have a wide spread of cereal diseases in the late 70s/early 80s which will destroy entire harvests.

Soviet healthcare wasn't perfect, but it worked, at least as far as counter-epidemic measures are concerned. I dunno, unless your POD is something like American test of "ethnic weapon" being too successfull (bug created to target Slavs specifically being tested in secret lab, this sort of crypto-stuff) and spreading out of control, I don't see epidemic as something capable to bring USSR down.

Angel Heart said:
Wasn't there a clash between Uzbeks and the Meskhetian Turks in 1989 and an uprising in Azerbaijan already in 1990? With a weak central government this shouldn't be too much ASBish.

Azerbaijan and Andizhan IOTL weren't causes of Perestroika, they were caused by it. Poisonous mix of freedom of expression, old tribal grievances and lack of understanding that freedom of expression assumes responsibility resulted in outbreaks of violence. In your TL everything would be quiet (as there's no freedom of expression ITTL, but plenty of paramilitary troops enforcing very rigid order) until central authority ceases to exist.

Angel Heart said:
Yes, but I don't think that the Kazakhs, the Ukrainians and the Estonians would just give in, so we might see some bloodshed after all.

Some bloodshed? Probably. In magnitude of hundreds, possibly thousands. But this isn't the stuff dark world is made of. I mentioned Ukraine, Estonia and Kazakhstan specifically as structure of Rusian settlement there makes them majority in relatively well-defined areas. So, there wouldn't be Russian militia invasions of Lvov, for example. But Donestk would just go. Same thing with Estonia. Tartu county would remain Estonian and, if stars are aligned right, they (Estonians) might get Tallinn, but they might kiss Narva and Northern Estonia good bye. Narva is 90%+ Russophone.

Angel Heart said:
Are you familiar with the game Shattered Union? The logic would be similar: The EU occupied Washington D.C. would be the central government of the new Russian Federation which is recognized by the International Community, while everything outside Moscow is ruled by countless warlords and Republics and/or Oblast which declared themselves independent who want to grab as much as possible and some might even want to restore the USSR.

I'm not much of a gamer, so answer is negative. I didn't play the Shattered Union. However, I may repeat that you need Somalians (i.e. deeply divided clan-based society with weak sense of unity) to get Somalia.

CanadianGoose · Sep 8, 2009

Berra said:
Would that be centered around just local independence or would any issues lead to fighting?

I would say "any issues". There's very little appetite for local separatism in Russia, so breakup should be beased on issues of survival in crumbling society.

Berra said:
How would it not turn into a guerilla war, requering perhaps a 10:1 superiority in numbers?

At least third of Ukrainians would be loyal in any conceivable scenario (remember, that only 17% of Ukrainian population identifies themselves as "Russian", but "Russophile" parties rarely score less than 40%, even with very "ethnically enlightened" electoral comissions counting votes), another third would be quiet out of fear and/or complacency and remaning third would be cleansed to Poland and Romania if they start an uprising. Nightmarish scenario, but not one Angel Heart is trying to come up with.

Berra said:
Something the Soviet Union was unable to win in Afganistan.

Let me remind you that Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan lived longer than USSR itself. I suspect Americans would be extatic to have something as stable there.

Berra · Sep 8, 2009

I bet you get the same numbers for Afganistan, say 20% have their tribal brothers on the Soviet border, 40% are happy not getting shot at and 30% escape to Pakistan. What I'm saying is that fighting a guerilla war is hard. UK didn't do well in Northern Irland and how big was IRA really?

Angel Heart · Sep 8, 2009

How about if we settle Russians in Central Asia so that they are spread more wideley there. Maybe having an ethnic distribution like in Bosnia might contribute by doing some damage.

Ethnic_Composition_of_BiH_in_1991.preview.gif

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/commonwealth/ussr_ethnic_1974.jpg

My gut feeling tells me that chosing 1984 as the POD is too late. For now I've run out of ideas.

CanadianGoose · Sep 9, 2009

Berra said:
I bet you get the same numbers for Afganistan, say 20% have their tribal brothers on the Soviet border, 40% are happy not getting shot at and 30% escape to Pakistan.

This is one good example. If you remember, North was an island of (relative) stability during all those dark years, with worst atrocities happening in Pushtun-dominated South and Center. What I'm trying to say here, Northern Kazakhstan or Eastern Ukraine would experience no more violence than, let's say, Serbia proper (outside of Kosovo) or Croatia (outside of Kraina). Those weren't dreamlands, but they didn't fit my definition of "most violent collapse" either.

Berra said:
What I'm saying is that fighting a guerilla war is hard. UK didn't do well in Northern Irland and how big was IRA really?

There's a world of difference between N. Ireland and, say, Kosovo or Somalia. And OP demanded Kosovo or Somalia from Brest to Vladivostok, if I understood him/her correctly.

Angel Heart said:
How about if we settle Russians in Central Asia so that they are spread more wideley there. Maybe having an ethnic distribution like in Bosnia might contribute by doing some damage

To a certain extent, this map is true for Central Asia. Russians naturally gravitated to big industrial or administrative centers, so "spots" of majority Russophone (everyone but "natives" were "Russians" there) population were spread. I can see Dushanbe or Tashkent fighting against native-dominated farming hinterlands (in fact, it happened in Dushanbe, Russians and secular Tajiks defending city from rural Islamist groups in 1991), but those events would be flashes in the pan for several reasons. "Russian Dushanbe" isn't sustainable. "Russian Northern Kazakhstan" is.

Angel Heart · Sep 19, 2009

I got two new ideas or better said questions:

1: Would it make a difference if the Soviet Union would have had a larger population? Was it more plausible for the PRC or the USSR to become Somalia?

2: What if the Red Army gains more power? Lets say the Oblasts are reigned by Generals who become power mongering warlords?

Right now I'm out of ideas. Do you, CanadianGoose or someone else have solution how to turn the Soviets into Somalis? :/