USSR still intact and Cold War still on

NFR

Wendell said:
Correct. But with regard to China, I saw both its liberalisation slowing, and that of the other Communists growing, if more slowly than otherwise.
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SO that's what you saw... and why? The economic liberalization was going far enough and well enough, and without the Soviet Collapse western investment is just going to come back faster, so why exactly would it slow when it didn't in our timeline?
 

Wendell

NFR said:
SO that's what you saw... and why? The economic liberalization was going far enough and well enough, and without the Soviet Collapse western investment is just going to come back faster, so why exactly would it slow when it didn't in our timeline?
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Because China will be watching with interest what happened in Moscow...
 

NFR

Wendell said:
Because China will be watching with interest what happened in Moscow...
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And what's going to happen there that makes them want to dump economic growth that's the one thing keeping the people happy? Siberia and Far East wanting union with China? Moscow becoming a vassal to Beijing? What?
 

Wendell

NFR said:
And what's going to happen there that makes them want to dump economic growth that's the one thing keeping the people happy? Siberia and Far East wanting union with China? Moscow becoming a vassal to Beijing? What?
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Probably the possibility of securing a steady supply of petrol, and a gradual subversion of Moscow, yes.
 

NFR

Wendell said:
Probably the possibility of securing a steady supply of petrol, and a gradual subversion of Moscow, yes.
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A steady supply of oil they can get by paying, as they do now. The Chinese have shown sufficient economic acumen to understand that an allied, even subservient Russia is no substitute for economic development, especially not in the crucial area of keeping the people happy.
 

Wendell

NFR said:
A steady supply of oil they can get by paying, as they do now. The Chinese have shown sufficient economic acumen to understand that an allied, even subservient Russia is no substitute for economic development, especially not in the crucial area of keeping the people happy.
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True, China will want and seek prosperity, but they know that it's a gradual process, and moving too fast could spark a coup in Beijing. Then what?
 

NFR

Wendell said:
True, China will want and seek prosperity, but they know that it's a gradual process, and moving too fast could spark a coup in Beijing. Then what?
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...no. Chinese political conditions in the past 20 years or so didn't favour anything like a military coup for hard communists - mostly because said faction was solidly decredited during Mao's little GPCR and chairman Hua's planned economy also failed. The closest to an armed power struggle was in 89, and then Deng still won handily. Besides, I think you speak of economic liberalization slowing down, slower than our timeline, and there's practically no one in China with any power that favours that, especially not the army, which
1) Was heavily into commerce at that point and
2) Liked the extra money a larger buget gets them.

What nobody would favour is a costly subjugation of Russia at the expense of economic growth. To be sure if we went seeking their protection they would accept while making us pay (a more extreme version of what happened in our timeline), but there's really no reason for them to stop liberalizing economically, too.
 

Ivan Druzhkov

Another problem of trying to figure out what a no-perestroika (or should it be no-glastnost?) USSR would look like is trying to figure out who’d be running it. In early 1984, the best bet for someone to pre-empt Gorbachev would be Dmitri Ustinov, Brezhnev-era defense minister and powerful conservative. Unfortunately, he died around the middle of 1984, and was actually slightly older than Chernenko, so I doubt that avoiding his death in '84 would keep him around long enough to permanently foil Gorbachev. Of course, we could always invent some young arch-conservative figure…
 
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