The Way the Wind Blows: The Collapse of Western Capitalism and the Second Cold War
- Thread starter Maponus
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I found this TL yesterday and thought it was on hiatus lol. I really want to know the PODs for this TL
Wasn't it George Wallace winning in 1968?
That's actually sort of what would have happened in the earliest iterations of Way the Wind Blows, as evidenced by my post in the "TL Ideas you have, but lack the wherewithal to execute" thread. It is not where I want to take the timeline now, however.
Yeah but there's got to be more especially with the significant divergences for OTL.
Zwinglian
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No he wins because the economy is collapsing because of an oil embargo so it goes back further
markus meecham
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Pale grey bunkerLol does anyone else think Hoxha looks a lot like Sagan?
Sagan's long lost commie bro
markus meecham
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More like if OTL's north korea was de jure capitalist and spent all their time telling everyone around how perfect their capitalism is behind their borders.
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SpookyBoy
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OTL Albania under Hoxha wasn't that far off from the DPRK, especially after they broke off from China.
As far as I remember, the attitude towards Che Guevara seemed to be approving - although he was considered to be a semi-literate romance, and his theoretical notes were not published. By the way - Che Guevara considered himself a Stalinist.
Given that Che became not a harmless revolutionary icon, but a major inspiration for his ideological enemies, Hoxha could be a little more critical of Che than usual ITTL.
IX: The Decade of Ascendency, The Soviet Union in the 1970’s
The Decade of Ascendency
The Soviet Union in the 1970’s
The 1977 October Revolution Parade, held at a time when Soviet power felt unquestionable.
The Soviet Union in the 1970’s
The 1977 October Revolution Parade, held at a time when Soviet power felt unquestionable.
What Soviet historians call the ‘Desyatiletiye Druzhby’ (Decade of Friendship), but is usually referred to outside the remaining Soviet bloc as the the Decade of Soviet Ascendency, is still widely regarded as a golden age for the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. From the period of the Revolutionary Thaw until 1974, to the early stages of the Second Cold War, the Soviet Union was effectively the worlds single superpower. The UPNA was for much of the decade both unwilling and unable to project power as the US had once done, and while the ideological hetrorthodoxy of the West European revolutions prevented true Soviet dominance of Europe, the division between the North-West and South-West Alliance made them poor competitors to the Warsaw Pact on the global stage. Much of Africa and the Middle East preferred the concrete benefits of Soviet friendship to that of the New Left powers, who were often more absorbed in internal affairs and post-revolutionary civic strife. Though challenges to Soviet hegemony still existed, they were defensive in nature, and both the Party leadership and the general Soviet public had never felt so secure. The spectre of Western Imperial aggression, itself a reflection of the national traumas suffered in the Great Patriotic War, had been seemingly banished. Khrushchev's controversy courting reign had been replaced by the steady hand of "collective party leadership" in the late sixties, and this had over time seamlessly morphed into the familiar spectacle of personal leadership by Mikhail Suslov, who remains popular today amongst Soviet hardliners as the "Pope" of the Eastern Bloc.
Typical images of carefree affluence that often characterise Soviet perceptions of the 1970's.
Largely unaffected by the 60’s energy crisis and by the subsequent market crash, and with the economic reforms of Kosygin beginning to pay off, Soviet citizens enjoyed perhaps the highest standard of living as had yet been possible in Soviet history. State propaganda presented the world revolution as an entirely Soviet achievement, as the payoff of the many sacrifices and struggles of the Soviet people across many decades. To this day many Soviet citizens credit Suslov (or, depending on their politics, Khrushchev) personally for the collapse of NATO and the end of the Wallace-LaMay regime. Bulgaria would be welcomed as the 16th Republic of the USSR with lavish televised ceremonies. The withdrawal of America troops from there many bases across Europe and Asia seemed a confirmation that Soviet military power was the greatest in the world. The 70’s has thus become a favourite setting in Soviet pop culture for romantic comedies and nostalgic coming of age stories, recalling an “innocent” time before the renewed anxieties of the 1980’s. Khrushchev’s already wildly optimistic predictions of an impending transition to Communism now seemed more credible and were parroted with ever more enthusiasm in the Party Congresses of this decade. Nostalgic Soviet commentators bemoan the loss of the sense of community and unity of the 70's, and reactionary Suslovites imagine the period as a perfect utopia betrayed by the weak leadership of his successors.
The Soviet leadership in 1972, shortly before Kosygin's fall from grace.
It goes without saying that from the perspective of those countries who feel victim to Soviet aggression in the 1970’s that it was hardly a “innocent” time, especially in the case of the Soviet invasions of Austria and Greece. Yet the golden glow that Soviets often attach to the 70’s serves not only to blind them from the crimes of Soviet aggression, but also to the various internal problems the USSR experienced in this so-called golden age. Kosygin, the man largely responsible for the successful economic reforms that made the 70’s so-well regarded in Soviet popular memory, spent much of the period under house arrest after being double crossed by his political partner Suslov, after proposing political reforms and a relaxed hold over the Eastern Bloc. It was precisely Kosygin’s downfall that prevented any hope of political reform and genuine diplomatic rapprochement with the West, that laid the basis for the many failures of the 80’s. Suslov’s leadership, though still celebrated in nationalistic circles, is now widely regarded by historians both inside and outside the USSR as being responsible for many intractable long-term problems that plague the Soviet Union today.
Though he rose to power as a critic of personal leadership, Suslov would eventually fully embrace the role of a Stalinist supreme leader, after finding so many of his inner party comrades unreliable and wayward.
Moreover, despite Kosygin’s reforms being a unquestionable success (largely thanks to the introduction of Cybersyn systems from Chile, then still friendly to the Soviet Union), the degree of cheerful affluence we are presented with in Soviet media about the period is highly exaggerated. Though consumer goods were more readily available than they had been before, they were often of poor quality. The very decentralised nature of the Kosygin system laid itself open to huge inequalities between regions, as cronyism and nepotism diverted state resources away from where they were needed to where the apparatchiks wanted them. Though the creation of cooperatives seemed on the surface to provide workers more freedom in the workplace, the lack of political and press freedom to back up this theoretical workplace democracy only served to highlight the gulf between the freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the First Workers State to that available to those living in the newest. Moreover, while more efficient, the new Soviet economy was becoming increasingly more overtly unequal as the Russian Party bureaucracy took for themselves the lion share of the economic benefit. Some national minorities even became worse off, as under Suslov Great Russian Chauvinism became an increasingly prominent part of Soviet life. While some might have hoped the accession of Bulgaria to the union might herald the dawn of a wider federal Soviet identity, it became increasingly evident that it was a Russian Empire. Chinese and Western accusations of “Social Imperialism” would eventually become harder to shake off. This is to say nothing of the many discontents that existed in the Eastern Bloc countries, especially in the DDR (whose very legitimacy and identity was seriously challenged by the mere existence of the Bundeskommune) and Czechoslovakia (where the scars of the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring were still felt). The very public spectacle of the unprovoked Soviet takeover of Austria is so familiar that it hardly needs to be commented on here.
This obviously didn’t bother many ordinary Russians, especially those who had lived through the many horrors and hardships of Stalinism and the Great Patriotic War and had "never had it so good". Indeed, oral studies of the popular humour of the Soviet people reveal an explosion of patriotic jokes at the expense of Western and Chinese socialism, alongside the usual diet of party officials and rustic national minorities. Such jokes often characterised foreign revolutionaries as pretentious try hards, dumb hedonists or simply as crazy lunatics, who could never live up to the Soviet original. Yet many seeds for future dissent were sown in this period. Many of the care-free youthful characters that populate 70’s nostalgia movies actually spent much of the period frustrated by a regime of cultural and political repression that was growing ever harder to justify in orthodox Marxist-Leninist terms. Many Soviet youth were confused and irritated by laws censuring music and fashion from countries that were revolutionary and socialist, and verbose, patronising state propaganda about Trotskyism and left-deviationism did little to satisfy them. Many Soviet youth longed to travel freely across the world, yet were usually only allowed to engage in heavily regulated holidays to Soviet friendly states. It was in the 70’s that the infamous and often harshly punished pastime of “hitch hiking” from approved Warsaw Pact locations to Paris or London began. Jewish refuseniks demands to relocate to a now socialist (and in fact broadly Soviet aligned) Israel only intensified as Suslov’s attempts to Russify Soviet Jews accelerated.
A stamp from 1975 celebrates the Soviet liberation of Korea.
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