Year of the Three Secretaries - A Soviet survival TL
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Chapter IV: Reform and the End of Détente, 1980-1984.
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To Reagan’s frustration, the Soviet Union didn’t respond in kind because Andropov was of the opinion that the USSR had more important matters to deal with. Besides that, Moscow was complacent about having taking the initiative in “punishing” Iran, something that had given it some measure of goodwill in the West. Right wingers criticized the United States for not having done the same thing, only responding militarily after the Soviets had already done so. As far as some right wing analysts were concerned in the two decades following the Soviet-Iranian War, the US had caved in the face of Muslim terrorists. Left wingers, by contrast, heralded the Soviet crusade (an ironic use of this terminology) against superstition and religious bigotry.
Based on the results of the Soviet-Iranian War of 1979, Andropov decided that it was a good idea for the Soviet Union to take the moral high ground vis-à-vis Reagan’s hard-line stance. For one thing, Andropov followed his mentor Kosygin and decided not to deploy SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Warsaw Pact countries even though the Soviet Army advised him to do so. The Soviet General Staff believed that NATO would use tactical nuclear weapons to counter the Warsaw Pact’s superiority in conventional forces, but Andropov was of the opinion that they wouldn’t. He correctly assessed that, in part thanks to pacifist movements in Western Europe, such a measure wouldn’t be passed as long as the Soviet Army stayed east of the Rhine and it indeed wasn’t because the West German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt rejected it (in the meantime Andropov was quite content staying east of the Rhine). The Federal Republic of Germany didn’t want the United States to place Pershing II missiles and Gryphon ground launched cruise missiles on its soil, to Reagan’s frustration. So he put them in Iran instead, to which Andropov responded by deploying his SS-20 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles to the Central Asian SSRs. The USSR abided by SALT I and also abided by SALT II despite the fact that the United States Senate had failed to ratify it. SALT II limited strategic launchers and banned new missile programs, a new missile defined as one with any key parameter 5% better than in currently deployed missiles.
In the meantime, Andropov was looking to push through further economic reform and eight years of tremendous success in the Special Economic Zones had been enough for the Soviet apparatchiks to mellow, seeing the possibilities of taxing a free market economy and thusly vastly increasing state revenue. Kronstadt was one of the initial Special Economic Zones and in 1982 that was expanded to the entire city of Leningrad, which was ideologically justified by pointing out Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which had allowed a limited measure of economic freedom. Besides that, Volgograd (known as Stalingrad until 1961) was chosen to become a Special Economic Zone. Volgograd was in the ideal spot to be a transhipment port branching out not only into the entire USSR but also into South Asia: the Volga-DonCanal connected the Volga and Donrivers, allowing ships to go from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. From Iran’s Caspian Sea coast goods could be transported to Persian Gulf ports through the Trans-Iranian Railway and from there to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Volgograd being open to foreign traffic and the emergency of indigenous Soviet light industry – producing clothes, shoes, furniture, consumer electronics and home appliances – complemented each other.
Besides Leningrad and Volgograd, five more cities similarly well located were also chosen to be Special Economic Zones: Kirov, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk were selected and that brought the total number to 14 (when counting Kronstadt as part of Leningrad). These five cities were chosen because they were located along the Trans-Siberian Railway and it is unsurprising that light industry catering to travellers emerged here. Travel agencies were founded in these cities to cater to tourists: they organized luxury three week trips for foreign tourists from Leningrad to Vladivostok to see the beautiful geographical diversity and urban architectonic achievements of Russia. What boosted traffic even more were Chinese economic reforms. Even though Beijing was particularly unfriendly to the USSR, Chinese traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway increased due to simple market mechanisms: shipping goods by rail through the Soviet Union to Western Europe took less time than shipping it by sea to Western European ports like Antwerp, Rotterdam or Hamburg. COMECON was de facto a customs union and the EEC was a de jure customs union, so there was really only one tariff barrier to cross for Chinese goods after the Sino-Soviet border, namely the border between East and West Germany (different railway gauges remained an obstacle, but speed still compensated). As a result, China, which had quit COMECON in 1961, became an observant member again in 1986 (a result of that was that Albania cut ties with China and became the hermit kingdom we know it as today; North Korea, by contrast, abandoned its hermit kingdom status when Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 and was succeeded by his pro-reform son Kim Jong-Il). Chinese with a certain measure of wealth resulting from Chinese economic reforms were certainly willing to pay to see Russia’s natural beauty. Ecologists, naturalists and other nature lovers across Western Europe felt the same.
With fourteen cities now open to foreign investment, albeit under the vigilant watch of the Soviet bureaucracy and its red tape, foreign investment picked up drastically in tine early 1980s, which is unsurprising. For one, the USSR was an untapped market of 270 million consumers and therefore much profit was to be made there. Secondly, the Soviet Union was rich in natural resources and they were available at low prices. Therefore companies wouldn’t need to import them: gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, tungsten, oil, natural gas and coal were ready for use. Thirdly, the USSR had a highly developed infrastructure of roads and railroads, although the fact that they were built to cater to a centrally planned rather than a free market economy would prove to be a problem that needed to be worked around creatively. It was nonetheless possible to move around capital, services and persons between the major cities, where most consumers and workers lived anyway. Also, the Soviet Union had an ocean of unskilled labourers but also many highly educated people: one advantage to Soviet workers was that their wages were so low (and that they “never complained”). The national GDP was 850 billion 2005 US dollars in 1982 and 270 million inhabitants meant an annual GDP per capita of only $3.150, which was less than Japan’s and South Korea’s at this point. The USSR, while richer than Third World countries, was decidedly a low wage country from a Western European point of view. The combination of a large market, an extensive infrastructure, readily accessible natural resources, low wages, and a population that was 95% literate was very attractive indeed.
A last element and crucial was the fact that the Soviet Union emphasized science and technology within its economy. By the 1980s, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World. Some Western corporations started joint venture projects in the Soviet Union producing items such as televisions, calculators, transistors, microprocessors, digital wristwatches, clocks, cameras, radios, walkmans etc. Some companies chose to prefabricate components cheaply in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and assemble them in Western Europe. Because the Soviets lagged behind in computer technology, multiple IT companies saw an opportunity to fill a vacuum and get rich in the process: in 1984 a partnership of IBM and Microsoft got permission to build a factory at Leningrad where modern computers would be built. Factories in several Eastern Bloc states would prefabricate the components which would be assembled in Leningrad. From there the finished computers could easily be exported through bulk container ships from the port of Leningrad. The Moscow State University hired Russian speaking IBM and Microsoft employees to help set up an academic IT infrastructure. The stated goal was to “prepare students to meet the computer technology needs of business, government, healthcare, schools, and other kinds of organizations”. The result was that within a decade’s time the Soviet Union was an exporter of cheap consumer electronics and an IT powerhouse, all thanks to outsourcing.
It took only a few years for the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) to have adopted MS-DOS computerswith the Windows 2.0 operating system. With only 640 kilobytes of memory and a 16-bit operating system they were primitive by 2013 standards, but at the time they revolutionized the USSR’s economic planning. Simplification of production, allocation and distribution through computerization helped to rationalize economic planning, enabling the state to shrink the bloated bureaucratic apparatus and still do the same amount of work. Also, corruption decreased strongly. Because production quotas were so important, lying about how much had been produced had become commonplace. Now this was much more difficult because it was all “in the system” in the shape of piles upon piles of floppy disks. It would become outright impossible when in 1995 Gosplan adopted an intranet through which information could be accessed immediately, on-demand at any given terminal. Besides that, complicated prediction models could now be calculated and the next Five-Year Plan was then adjusted accordingly.
The USSR, while growing economically, did have to face one particularly dangerous crisis during Andropov’s tenure: Solidarity. Solidarity is a Polish trade union federation that emerged in August 1980 at the Gdańsk Shipyard under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. It was the first non–communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. Solidarity reached 9.5 million members before its September 1981 Congress and that constituted 1/3 of the total working age population of Poland. In its clandestine years, the United States provided significant financial support for Solidarity, estimated to be as much as 50 million US dollars. In the 1980s, Solidarity was a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement, using the methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of workers’ rights and social change. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s and several years of political repression, but in the end it was forced to negotiate with the union. The cause of this social unrest was the policy of Edward Gierek who, with Moscow’s permission, had secured loans in the West to further economic development. Now the country was suffering from stagflation, being the only country of the Eastern Bloc besides East Germany that did not experience increased economic growth.
Andropov’s gut told him to intervene militarily, but after further consideration he refrained from doing so based on the popular support of Solidarity. He feared a massive insurgency in Poland if the Soviet Army invaded and the worldwide anti-Soviet backlash that would inevitably follow on violent repression. Instead, the leaders of Solidarity were put under intense surveillance from both the KGB and Poland’s own Ministry of Public Security, which included around the clock stakeouts, wiretaps, being tailed and infiltration of their social circles by government agents. The Ministry of Public Security quietly intimidated Wałęsa and his fellow Solidarity leaders to not make too much of a noise in public and be more “constructive”. The latter meant that Solidarity’s leadership would be co-opted in a new policy that would be set out by the leadership of the People’s Republic of Poland: one of gradualist reformism. In 1982, Edward Gierek was succeeded as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party by Stanislaw Kania, a moderate Polish communist leader. He enacted a reform that bore a remarkable similarity to Dubček’s 1968 “Action Programme”. Kania’s reform consisted of liberalizations, which included increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement, with economic emphasis on consumer goods. The reform package also covered foreign policy, including both the maintenance of good relations with Western countries and cooperation with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc nations. That did much to soothe social malcontent.
In the meantime, Andropov was becoming increasingly ill and spent much of 1983 hospitalized, but that didn’t stop him from leading his country. His aides visited him regularly, providing him with documents and keeping him up-to-date. His sickness was the symptom of a problem in the country’s leadership, namely the fact that it was a gerontocracy. Old men led the country and Andropov realized all too well that fresh blood was needed in the top echelons of party and government. That had inspired him to make his protégé Mikhail Gorbachev Deputy General Secretary in 1982, when Gorbachev was only 51 years old, significantly younger than the average age of the inner party. Andropov died in February 1984 at age 69 due to renal failure. Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Premier of the Soviet Union at age 53.
.Chapter IV: Reform and the End of Détente, 1980-1984.
The Reagan administration went on the offensive from the start by pushing the B-1 Lancer, a supersonic strategic bomber cancelled by Carter, and the LGM-118 Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile. Together with Great Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms. In a famous address on June 8th 1982 to the British Parliament in the Royal Gallery of Westminster, Reagan said, “the forward march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash-heap of history”. On March 3rd 1983, he predicted that communism would collapse, stating “communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.” In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8th 1983, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire”.
To Reagan’s frustration, the Soviet Union didn’t respond in kind because Andropov was of the opinion that the USSR had more important matters to deal with. Besides that, Moscow was complacent about having taking the initiative in “punishing” Iran, something that had given it some measure of goodwill in the West. Right wingers criticized the United States for not having done the same thing, only responding militarily after the Soviets had already done so. As far as some right wing analysts were concerned in the two decades following the Soviet-Iranian War, the US had caved in the face of Muslim terrorists. Left wingers, by contrast, heralded the Soviet crusade (an ironic use of this terminology) against superstition and religious bigotry.
Based on the results of the Soviet-Iranian War of 1979, Andropov decided that it was a good idea for the Soviet Union to take the moral high ground vis-à-vis Reagan’s hard-line stance. For one thing, Andropov followed his mentor Kosygin and decided not to deploy SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Warsaw Pact countries even though the Soviet Army advised him to do so. The Soviet General Staff believed that NATO would use tactical nuclear weapons to counter the Warsaw Pact’s superiority in conventional forces, but Andropov was of the opinion that they wouldn’t. He correctly assessed that, in part thanks to pacifist movements in Western Europe, such a measure wouldn’t be passed as long as the Soviet Army stayed east of the Rhine and it indeed wasn’t because the West German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt rejected it (in the meantime Andropov was quite content staying east of the Rhine). The Federal Republic of Germany didn’t want the United States to place Pershing II missiles and Gryphon ground launched cruise missiles on its soil, to Reagan’s frustration. So he put them in Iran instead, to which Andropov responded by deploying his SS-20 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles to the Central Asian SSRs. The USSR abided by SALT I and also abided by SALT II despite the fact that the United States Senate had failed to ratify it. SALT II limited strategic launchers and banned new missile programs, a new missile defined as one with any key parameter 5% better than in currently deployed missiles.
In the meantime, Andropov was looking to push through further economic reform and eight years of tremendous success in the Special Economic Zones had been enough for the Soviet apparatchiks to mellow, seeing the possibilities of taxing a free market economy and thusly vastly increasing state revenue. Kronstadt was one of the initial Special Economic Zones and in 1982 that was expanded to the entire city of Leningrad, which was ideologically justified by pointing out Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which had allowed a limited measure of economic freedom. Besides that, Volgograd (known as Stalingrad until 1961) was chosen to become a Special Economic Zone. Volgograd was in the ideal spot to be a transhipment port branching out not only into the entire USSR but also into South Asia: the Volga-DonCanal connected the Volga and Donrivers, allowing ships to go from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. From Iran’s Caspian Sea coast goods could be transported to Persian Gulf ports through the Trans-Iranian Railway and from there to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Volgograd being open to foreign traffic and the emergency of indigenous Soviet light industry – producing clothes, shoes, furniture, consumer electronics and home appliances – complemented each other.
Besides Leningrad and Volgograd, five more cities similarly well located were also chosen to be Special Economic Zones: Kirov, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk were selected and that brought the total number to 14 (when counting Kronstadt as part of Leningrad). These five cities were chosen because they were located along the Trans-Siberian Railway and it is unsurprising that light industry catering to travellers emerged here. Travel agencies were founded in these cities to cater to tourists: they organized luxury three week trips for foreign tourists from Leningrad to Vladivostok to see the beautiful geographical diversity and urban architectonic achievements of Russia. What boosted traffic even more were Chinese economic reforms. Even though Beijing was particularly unfriendly to the USSR, Chinese traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway increased due to simple market mechanisms: shipping goods by rail through the Soviet Union to Western Europe took less time than shipping it by sea to Western European ports like Antwerp, Rotterdam or Hamburg. COMECON was de facto a customs union and the EEC was a de jure customs union, so there was really only one tariff barrier to cross for Chinese goods after the Sino-Soviet border, namely the border between East and West Germany (different railway gauges remained an obstacle, but speed still compensated). As a result, China, which had quit COMECON in 1961, became an observant member again in 1986 (a result of that was that Albania cut ties with China and became the hermit kingdom we know it as today; North Korea, by contrast, abandoned its hermit kingdom status when Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 and was succeeded by his pro-reform son Kim Jong-Il). Chinese with a certain measure of wealth resulting from Chinese economic reforms were certainly willing to pay to see Russia’s natural beauty. Ecologists, naturalists and other nature lovers across Western Europe felt the same.
With fourteen cities now open to foreign investment, albeit under the vigilant watch of the Soviet bureaucracy and its red tape, foreign investment picked up drastically in tine early 1980s, which is unsurprising. For one, the USSR was an untapped market of 270 million consumers and therefore much profit was to be made there. Secondly, the Soviet Union was rich in natural resources and they were available at low prices. Therefore companies wouldn’t need to import them: gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, tungsten, oil, natural gas and coal were ready for use. Thirdly, the USSR had a highly developed infrastructure of roads and railroads, although the fact that they were built to cater to a centrally planned rather than a free market economy would prove to be a problem that needed to be worked around creatively. It was nonetheless possible to move around capital, services and persons between the major cities, where most consumers and workers lived anyway. Also, the Soviet Union had an ocean of unskilled labourers but also many highly educated people: one advantage to Soviet workers was that their wages were so low (and that they “never complained”). The national GDP was 850 billion 2005 US dollars in 1982 and 270 million inhabitants meant an annual GDP per capita of only $3.150, which was less than Japan’s and South Korea’s at this point. The USSR, while richer than Third World countries, was decidedly a low wage country from a Western European point of view. The combination of a large market, an extensive infrastructure, readily accessible natural resources, low wages, and a population that was 95% literate was very attractive indeed.
A last element and crucial was the fact that the Soviet Union emphasized science and technology within its economy. By the 1980s, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World. Some Western corporations started joint venture projects in the Soviet Union producing items such as televisions, calculators, transistors, microprocessors, digital wristwatches, clocks, cameras, radios, walkmans etc. Some companies chose to prefabricate components cheaply in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and assemble them in Western Europe. Because the Soviets lagged behind in computer technology, multiple IT companies saw an opportunity to fill a vacuum and get rich in the process: in 1984 a partnership of IBM and Microsoft got permission to build a factory at Leningrad where modern computers would be built. Factories in several Eastern Bloc states would prefabricate the components which would be assembled in Leningrad. From there the finished computers could easily be exported through bulk container ships from the port of Leningrad. The Moscow State University hired Russian speaking IBM and Microsoft employees to help set up an academic IT infrastructure. The stated goal was to “prepare students to meet the computer technology needs of business, government, healthcare, schools, and other kinds of organizations”. The result was that within a decade’s time the Soviet Union was an exporter of cheap consumer electronics and an IT powerhouse, all thanks to outsourcing.
It took only a few years for the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) to have adopted MS-DOS computerswith the Windows 2.0 operating system. With only 640 kilobytes of memory and a 16-bit operating system they were primitive by 2013 standards, but at the time they revolutionized the USSR’s economic planning. Simplification of production, allocation and distribution through computerization helped to rationalize economic planning, enabling the state to shrink the bloated bureaucratic apparatus and still do the same amount of work. Also, corruption decreased strongly. Because production quotas were so important, lying about how much had been produced had become commonplace. Now this was much more difficult because it was all “in the system” in the shape of piles upon piles of floppy disks. It would become outright impossible when in 1995 Gosplan adopted an intranet through which information could be accessed immediately, on-demand at any given terminal. Besides that, complicated prediction models could now be calculated and the next Five-Year Plan was then adjusted accordingly.
The USSR, while growing economically, did have to face one particularly dangerous crisis during Andropov’s tenure: Solidarity. Solidarity is a Polish trade union federation that emerged in August 1980 at the Gdańsk Shipyard under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. It was the first non–communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. Solidarity reached 9.5 million members before its September 1981 Congress and that constituted 1/3 of the total working age population of Poland. In its clandestine years, the United States provided significant financial support for Solidarity, estimated to be as much as 50 million US dollars. In the 1980s, Solidarity was a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement, using the methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of workers’ rights and social change. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s and several years of political repression, but in the end it was forced to negotiate with the union. The cause of this social unrest was the policy of Edward Gierek who, with Moscow’s permission, had secured loans in the West to further economic development. Now the country was suffering from stagflation, being the only country of the Eastern Bloc besides East Germany that did not experience increased economic growth.
Andropov’s gut told him to intervene militarily, but after further consideration he refrained from doing so based on the popular support of Solidarity. He feared a massive insurgency in Poland if the Soviet Army invaded and the worldwide anti-Soviet backlash that would inevitably follow on violent repression. Instead, the leaders of Solidarity were put under intense surveillance from both the KGB and Poland’s own Ministry of Public Security, which included around the clock stakeouts, wiretaps, being tailed and infiltration of their social circles by government agents. The Ministry of Public Security quietly intimidated Wałęsa and his fellow Solidarity leaders to not make too much of a noise in public and be more “constructive”. The latter meant that Solidarity’s leadership would be co-opted in a new policy that would be set out by the leadership of the People’s Republic of Poland: one of gradualist reformism. In 1982, Edward Gierek was succeeded as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party by Stanislaw Kania, a moderate Polish communist leader. He enacted a reform that bore a remarkable similarity to Dubček’s 1968 “Action Programme”. Kania’s reform consisted of liberalizations, which included increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement, with economic emphasis on consumer goods. The reform package also covered foreign policy, including both the maintenance of good relations with Western countries and cooperation with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc nations. That did much to soothe social malcontent.
In the meantime, Andropov was becoming increasingly ill and spent much of 1983 hospitalized, but that didn’t stop him from leading his country. His aides visited him regularly, providing him with documents and keeping him up-to-date. His sickness was the symptom of a problem in the country’s leadership, namely the fact that it was a gerontocracy. Old men led the country and Andropov realized all too well that fresh blood was needed in the top echelons of party and government. That had inspired him to make his protégé Mikhail Gorbachev Deputy General Secretary in 1982, when Gorbachev was only 51 years old, significantly younger than the average age of the inner party. Andropov died in February 1984 at age 69 due to renal failure. Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Premier of the Soviet Union at age 53.
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So, Gorbachev comes to power a year earlier then he did OTL. Interesting with swapping Albania's and North Korea's positions. Besides Poland, you haven't mentioned China and other Eastern Block leaders yet as far as I know.
Awesome timeline
Well researched.
I think that in this scenario China and the Soviet Union could have warmer relations quicker than in OTL (with Gorbachev in command from 1984, a reduced Afghanistan, and the feeling that is more Reagan than Andropov that is causing the Cold War resurgence I think the probabilities are high)
In OTL also Ronald Reagan for example initially had a very cold attitude towards China without the Afghanistan of OTL and without euromissiles I think China could decide to look for warmer relations with the USSR considering that the USSR is showing less agresivity than USA.
in OTL for example 1982-83 see warmer relations between USSR and China while the USA continued to have a more or less cold relation in general with China:
"
(b) U.S.-China relations
China harbored great caution against U.S. President Reagan's pro-Taiwan policies, and this has constituted a big barrier against the development of relations between the U.S. and China since the start of the Reagan administration. The bilateral consultations on the transfer of American arms to Taiwan were held when Assistant Secretary of State Holdridge and Vice President Bush visited China in January and May 1982, respectively. In August 1982, the two nations reached an agreement that the transfer of U.S. arms to Taiwan should not exceed the level of immediately after normalization of U.S.-China relations and that it should be gradually decreased. A joint communique to that effect was announced by the two countries. However, the somewhat chilly relations between them continued since their interpretations of the joint communique and their positions on other Taiwan issues later proved different.
Secretary Shultz's visit to China in February 1983 was aimed at promoting communication between the two countries and normalizing their chilly relations. In Beijing, Secretary Shultz held talks with Chairman Deng Xiaoping, Premier Zhao Ziyang and Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian. They agreed to make efforts to nurture mutual trust, and thus paved the way for continuous dialogue.
Despite this, discord between the two countries continued over delicate political issues such as China's membership in the Asian Development Bank, Huguang Railway bonds, the U.S. announcement of arms sales to Taiwan for fiscal 1983 and 1984, the U.S. acceptance of Chinese tennis player Hu Na who sought political asylum, and the resultant suspension of the remaining U.S.-China cultural exchange programs for 1982 and 1983 as well as China's absence from international sports events of 1983 in the U.S. Meanwhile, their economic relations showed a relatively smooth development in the fields of trade, science and technology. With regard to the U.S. policy of restricting transfer of high technology to China of which China had expressed complaint, the U.S. government announced its decision in May to include China in the same group as non-Communist countries, including Japan and India, under the Export Control Law.
(c) Sino-Soviet relations in 1982 were on a course considerably different from that in 1981, as shown by such facts as the first vice ministerial meeting in October, the Foreign Ministers' meeting on the occasion of the funeral for General Secretary Brezhnev, and the expansion of personnel exchanges, and trade and economic relations.
In March, the late General Secretary Brezhnev appealed in his public speech for the improvement of Sino-Soviet relations. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to it, saying that China firmly refuses the accusation against it made in Brezhnev's speech and that what China attaches importance to are the actual actions by the Russians. The spokesman added, however, that China will take note of Brezhnev's speech. The two countries later made working-level contacts, such as the Soviet Foreign Ministry's First Far Eastern Department Director Kapitsa's visit to China and the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Soviet Union and East European Affairs Department Director Yu Hongliang's visit to the Soviet Union. In September, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang revealed a more positive attitude than before toward the Soviet Union, although with some reservations, when he referred to the possibility of normalizing Sino-Soviet relations in his report to the 12th CPC National Congress.
The first vice ministerial meeting was held in Beijing from Oct. 5 to Oct. 22. The content of the talks at this meeting is not known since the two countries agreed not to disclose it. It was reported, however, that their basic positions differed. In particular the Soviet Union did not show readiness for concessions to the so-called "three conditions" presented by China-reduction of Soviet forces in the area along the Sino-Soviet border, withdrawal of Soviet forces from Mongolia and Afghanistan, and suspension of Soviet assistance to Viet Nam. At this meeting, they agreed to make the vice ministerial contacts thereafter in Moscow and Beijing alternately and the second vice ministerial talks were held in Moscow in March 1983.
Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua held talks with Foreign Minister Gromyko when he attended the funeral for the late General Secretary Brezhnev in November. It was announced that their meeting was held in a "candid and calm atmosphere." This was the first visit to Moscow by a Chinese cabinet minister since November 1964 when the then Chinese Premier Chou Enlai visited the Soviet capital.
Trade between the two countries was expanded, and agreements on cargo transportation and border trade were signed. Further to that, new developments took place in the form of visits to China by a Soviet team of field athletes and the Boljshoi Ballet Team and also an agreement on student exchange."
From Diplomatic Bluebook of Japanese Foreign Affairs ministery http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/other/bluebook/1983/1983-2.htm
Subscribed to this thread without doubt
Well researched.
I think that in this scenario China and the Soviet Union could have warmer relations quicker than in OTL (with Gorbachev in command from 1984, a reduced Afghanistan, and the feeling that is more Reagan than Andropov that is causing the Cold War resurgence I think the probabilities are high)
In OTL also Ronald Reagan for example initially had a very cold attitude towards China without the Afghanistan of OTL and without euromissiles I think China could decide to look for warmer relations with the USSR considering that the USSR is showing less agresivity than USA.
in OTL for example 1982-83 see warmer relations between USSR and China while the USA continued to have a more or less cold relation in general with China:
"
(b) U.S.-China relations
China harbored great caution against U.S. President Reagan's pro-Taiwan policies, and this has constituted a big barrier against the development of relations between the U.S. and China since the start of the Reagan administration. The bilateral consultations on the transfer of American arms to Taiwan were held when Assistant Secretary of State Holdridge and Vice President Bush visited China in January and May 1982, respectively. In August 1982, the two nations reached an agreement that the transfer of U.S. arms to Taiwan should not exceed the level of immediately after normalization of U.S.-China relations and that it should be gradually decreased. A joint communique to that effect was announced by the two countries. However, the somewhat chilly relations between them continued since their interpretations of the joint communique and their positions on other Taiwan issues later proved different.
Secretary Shultz's visit to China in February 1983 was aimed at promoting communication between the two countries and normalizing their chilly relations. In Beijing, Secretary Shultz held talks with Chairman Deng Xiaoping, Premier Zhao Ziyang and Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian. They agreed to make efforts to nurture mutual trust, and thus paved the way for continuous dialogue.
Despite this, discord between the two countries continued over delicate political issues such as China's membership in the Asian Development Bank, Huguang Railway bonds, the U.S. announcement of arms sales to Taiwan for fiscal 1983 and 1984, the U.S. acceptance of Chinese tennis player Hu Na who sought political asylum, and the resultant suspension of the remaining U.S.-China cultural exchange programs for 1982 and 1983 as well as China's absence from international sports events of 1983 in the U.S. Meanwhile, their economic relations showed a relatively smooth development in the fields of trade, science and technology. With regard to the U.S. policy of restricting transfer of high technology to China of which China had expressed complaint, the U.S. government announced its decision in May to include China in the same group as non-Communist countries, including Japan and India, under the Export Control Law.
(c) Sino-Soviet relations in 1982 were on a course considerably different from that in 1981, as shown by such facts as the first vice ministerial meeting in October, the Foreign Ministers' meeting on the occasion of the funeral for General Secretary Brezhnev, and the expansion of personnel exchanges, and trade and economic relations.
In March, the late General Secretary Brezhnev appealed in his public speech for the improvement of Sino-Soviet relations. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to it, saying that China firmly refuses the accusation against it made in Brezhnev's speech and that what China attaches importance to are the actual actions by the Russians. The spokesman added, however, that China will take note of Brezhnev's speech. The two countries later made working-level contacts, such as the Soviet Foreign Ministry's First Far Eastern Department Director Kapitsa's visit to China and the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Soviet Union and East European Affairs Department Director Yu Hongliang's visit to the Soviet Union. In September, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang revealed a more positive attitude than before toward the Soviet Union, although with some reservations, when he referred to the possibility of normalizing Sino-Soviet relations in his report to the 12th CPC National Congress.
The first vice ministerial meeting was held in Beijing from Oct. 5 to Oct. 22. The content of the talks at this meeting is not known since the two countries agreed not to disclose it. It was reported, however, that their basic positions differed. In particular the Soviet Union did not show readiness for concessions to the so-called "three conditions" presented by China-reduction of Soviet forces in the area along the Sino-Soviet border, withdrawal of Soviet forces from Mongolia and Afghanistan, and suspension of Soviet assistance to Viet Nam. At this meeting, they agreed to make the vice ministerial contacts thereafter in Moscow and Beijing alternately and the second vice ministerial talks were held in Moscow in March 1983.
Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua held talks with Foreign Minister Gromyko when he attended the funeral for the late General Secretary Brezhnev in November. It was announced that their meeting was held in a "candid and calm atmosphere." This was the first visit to Moscow by a Chinese cabinet minister since November 1964 when the then Chinese Premier Chou Enlai visited the Soviet capital.
Trade between the two countries was expanded, and agreements on cargo transportation and border trade were signed. Further to that, new developments took place in the form of visits to China by a Soviet team of field athletes and the Boljshoi Ballet Team and also an agreement on student exchange."
From Diplomatic Bluebook of Japanese Foreign Affairs ministery http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/other/bluebook/1983/1983-2.htm
Subscribed to this thread without doubt
Good TL Onkel!
Looking forward to seeing what you do with Gorby.
Will you kill him off?
Have an alt universe divergence/Personal experience that steers him away from his OTL destructive Agenda?
Kill his wife off?
Have him pick a different Cadre to appoint in Govt from OTL that avoids the disastrous Glasnost run by the dirtbag Yakovlev?
Very curious!
Looking forward to seeing what you do with Gorby.
Will you kill him off?
Have an alt universe divergence/Personal experience that steers him away from his OTL destructive Agenda?
Kill his wife off?
Have him pick a different Cadre to appoint in Govt from OTL that avoids the disastrous Glasnost run by the dirtbag Yakovlev?
Very curious!
Zimmerwald1915
Banned
Something tells me Onkel doesn't see things quite the way you doGood TL Onkel!
Looking forward to seeing what you do with Gorby.
Will you kill him off?
Have an alt universe divergence/Personal experience that steers him away from his OTL destructive Agenda?
Kill his wife off?
Have him pick a different Cadre to appoint in Govt from OTL that avoids the disastrous Glasnost run by the dirtbag Yakovlev?
Very curious!
Interesting timeline. Would be more interesting with a map. Does the expanded Azerbaijani SSR contain Iranian Kurdistan as well, for instance? Subscribed nevertheless.
Will something similar to Chernobyl occur ITTL? The OTL accident was incredibly unlikely and required basically everything to go wrong that could, but it's still possible. Given the poor quality control of Soviet nuclear reactors, some kind of accident is probably somewhere, even if it isn't as bad as Chernobyl.
There were the Beloyarka leaks, for example. But there was only one Chernobyl.
@OnkelWillie: a lot of it reads pretty optimistically, but still a very well done timeline so far.
From what I know of Soviet workers and the "stereotypical Soviet" in general, I find this unlikely
. Maybe they never complained while the big boss was around, though...I agree with you, certainly the nuclear accident of Chernobyl was a link of situations that were normally highly improbable.
In the other side it could be worse, instead of Chernobyl imagine that the accident happens in Ignalina in Lithuania, it could have a lot of far more political consecuences with the Baltic Republics having unrest several years before than in OTL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignalina_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Well, Ithink, problem was, people had money, but nothing to buy for them. And that what people complained about.From what I know of Soviet workers and the "stereotypical Soviet" in general, I find this unlikely
Chapter V: Renewed Confrontation, 1984-1988.
An update, a small one !
Gorbachev attended the important 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, where Nikita Khrushchev announced a plan to surpass the United States in per capita production within twenty years. Gorbachev rose in the territorial leagues of the party and he was promoted to Head of the Department of Party Organs in the Stavropol Agricultural Kraikom in 1963. In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, a body of the CPSU, becoming one of the youngest provincial party leaders in the country. In this position he helped reorganise the collective farms, improve workers’ living conditions, expand the size of their private plots, and gave them a greater voice in planning. His excellent performance was noted and based on that he was made a member of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1971 and a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs in 1974. He was subsequently appointed to the Central Committee’s Secretariat for Agriculture in 1978. In 1979, Gorbachev was promoted to the Politburo, the highest authority in the country, and received full membership in 1980. During Yuri Andropov’s tenure as General Secretary (1980-1984), Gorbachev became one of the Politburo’s most visible and active members and Andropov had seen in him the way to prevent the looming threat of leadership discontinuity. Any other successor could probably die within only a few years of Andropov’s own death, something the latter had realized all too well.
Gorbachev was confronted by foreign and domestic policy problems that needed immediate addressing. A first foreign problem, of military nature, was a defence program known as the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), colloquially known by the disparaging epithet “Star Wars”. The corresponding Strategic Defence Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up within the Department of Defence in 1984. It was supposed to be a watertight missile shield consisting of anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) but also hypervelocity railguns and other kinetic energy weapons, particle beams, laser satellites and various sensor systems. Dr. Carol Rosin first used the moniker Star Wars when in an article in the Washington Post in March 1983, implying that it was an impractical science-fiction fantasy. Opponents were quick to adopt the term and that did much to harm the credibility of the programme, even though Reagan repeatedly requested for the official name to be used. Ashton Carter, a board member at MIT, assessed SDI for Congress in 1984, saying there were a number of difficulties in creating an adequate missile defence shield, with or without lasers. Carter said X-rays have a limited scope because they become diffused through the atmosphere, much like the beam of a flashlight spreading outward in all directions. This means the X-rays needed to be close to the Soviet Union, especially during the critical few minutes of the booster phase, in order for the Soviet missiles to be both detectable to radar and targeted by the lasers themselves.
Physicist Hans Bethe, who worked with Edward Teller on both the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, claimed a laser defence shield was unfeasible. He said that a defensive system was costly and difficult to build yet simple to destroy, and claimed that the Soviets could easily use thousands of decoys to overwhelm it during a nuclear attack. In response to this when Teller testified before Congress he stated that “instead of [Bethe] objecting on scientific and technical grounds, which he thoroughly understands, he now objects on the grounds of politics, on grounds of military feasibility of military deployment, on other grounds of difficult issues which are quite outside the range of his professional cognizance or mine”. In David Lorge Parnas resigned from SDIO’s Panel on Computing in Support of Battle Management, arguing in eight short papers that the software required by the Strategic Defence Initiative could never be made to be trustworthy and that such a system would inevitably be unreliable and constitute a menace to humanity in its own right. Parnas said he joined the panel with the desire to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” but soon concluded that the concept was “a fraud”.
In 1985, Gorbachev summoned his top nuclear strategists and was reassured that SDI was a bluff on Reagan’s part, whether Reagan knew it or not. Gorbachev got wind of the criticism and the unfeasibility of SDI and by 1986 he saw it as a joke rather than a threat to Soviet national security, a storm in a glass of water. In November 1985 he attended the Geneva Summit and there he announced that “the implementation of SDI is a gross violation of existing treaties that will be parried by the Soviet Union”, setting a tone for icy East-West relations. Star Wars would have been a blatant violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which forbade the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its subsequent protocol, which limited missile defences to one location per country at 100 missiles each (which the USSR had and the US did not), would have been violated by SDI ground-based interceptors. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Many viewed favouring deployment of ABM systems as an escalation rather than cessation of the nuclear arms race, and therefore a violation of this clause. Gorbachev had certainly been influenced by the attitude of his mentor Andropov toward Reagan and he viewed the latter as a populist blowhard. Gorbachev therefore threatened to unilaterally abrogate the above treaties as well as SALT I and II if SDI was implemented. Reagan had little choice but to quietly terminate his pet project and in that sense the Democratic victory in the 1986 midterm elections was convenient because the Democrat dominated Congress blocked SDI from going any further.
SDI and the perception that Reagan was the primary cause for this latest Cold War escalation, as well as Reagan’s cold attitude toward “Red China”, also caused increased unity in the communist camp. Sino-Soviet relations, in a deep freeze since the Khrushchev years, experienced a thaw when in 1985 Gorbachev held a speech in which he expressed the desire to mend relations with the People’s Republic of China. Gorbachev proposed a rearrangement of the border, recognising that the Sino-Soviet border was the result of “aggressive and morally repugnant bourgeois, imperialist games by the Tsars”. Both sides agreed that Zhenbao Island belonged to China (both sides claimed the island was under their control at the time of the agreement). On October 1st 1986 (the anniversary of the PRC), an agreement over the last 54 kilometres (34 mi) stretch of the border was reached, along with the question of islands in the Argun and Amur rivers. China was granted control over Tarabarov Island (YinlongIsland), Zhenbao Island, and approximately 50% of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island (Heixiazi Island), near Khabarovsk. Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev made reciprocal state visits and China formally joined COMECON in 1987.
In the meantime, Gorbachev had to deal with the formidable challenge of pushing Soviet economic reform further because the gerontocracy was very apprehensive of going beyond what had been done until then. He responded to that by “retiring” some of them while he rallied support in the Central Committee and the politburo by gradually introducing protégés of his own into both bodies. The result was that one day the old men woke up finding that they were a minority in the country’s highest decision-making bodies. As a result Gorbachev managed to pass measures that were radical at the time. For one, he legalized and deregulated light industry across the country (which led to the abolition of the Special Economic Zones because they were now superfluous). Soviet citizens everywhere could now open their own businesses, small and medium sized ones at least, and sell their products privately. Decisions regarding investment, production and distribution were now based on supply and demand, and prices of goods and services were determined in a free price system from now on. The free market and the woes of private entrepreneurs were now determining factors and that made the Soviet economy much more vibrant. Heavy industry, mining, the petroleum and natural gas sector, armaments production, the aerospace industry and also healthcare, education and public transportation remained state controlled and subjected to Five-Year Plans. The second major revolution was the privatization of the agricultural sector. Basing himself on the argument that the landless peasants that collectivization had to serve no longer existed, he privatized the sovkhozes, the state farms. They were now no longer subjected to state planning of any kind, were now completely free to use material incentives to boost productivity and were free to sell their products to private distributors of their own choosing. The collective farms, the kolkhozes, were turned into cooperative farms with the same freedom as the former sovkhozes.
Economic liberalization brought the need for political liberalization. For one, Gorbachev realized all too well that very strict internal and external travel restrictions on Soviet citizens conflicted with his economic reform, so he had little choice but to abolish those. Soviet entrepreneurs that exported to Europe – and there were quite many because Westerners were eager to buy cheap but sturdy Soviet consumer products over more expensive Western versions – came into contact with the world on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They naturally relayed to others what they had seen and awareness of the lack of political freedom grew, which was complemented by the fact that the size of the country’s television audience grew dramatically. It was estimated that 98% of the Soviet population watched TV by 1988. There was also the fact that increase in real income, and the subsequent option to take time off from work, allowed some to pursue intellectual hobbies much farther than they otherwise could have. Many, especially those allowed to travel outside the Eastern Bloc, came in contact with ideas contrary to communism which had long been censored, but which were impossible to keep out due to the aforementioned developments.
!Chapter V: Renewed Confrontation, 1984-1988.
Gorbachev, like Andropov, was both General Secretary and Chairman of the Council of Ministers and therefore had major power, allowing him to act dynamically. Gorbachev had been born in 1931 near Stavropol into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family and saw a large part of his native village die during the Holodomor, including two aunts and an uncle. In his teens he operated combine harvesters on collective farms and then went to study law at the MoscowStateUniversity, graduating in 1955. In 1967 he obtained a master’s degree in agronomics at the Stravopol Institute of Agriculture and there he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev attended the important 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, where Nikita Khrushchev announced a plan to surpass the United States in per capita production within twenty years. Gorbachev rose in the territorial leagues of the party and he was promoted to Head of the Department of Party Organs in the Stavropol Agricultural Kraikom in 1963. In 1970, he was appointed First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, a body of the CPSU, becoming one of the youngest provincial party leaders in the country. In this position he helped reorganise the collective farms, improve workers’ living conditions, expand the size of their private plots, and gave them a greater voice in planning. His excellent performance was noted and based on that he was made a member of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1971 and a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Standing Commission on Youth Affairs in 1974. He was subsequently appointed to the Central Committee’s Secretariat for Agriculture in 1978. In 1979, Gorbachev was promoted to the Politburo, the highest authority in the country, and received full membership in 1980. During Yuri Andropov’s tenure as General Secretary (1980-1984), Gorbachev became one of the Politburo’s most visible and active members and Andropov had seen in him the way to prevent the looming threat of leadership discontinuity. Any other successor could probably die within only a few years of Andropov’s own death, something the latter had realized all too well.
Gorbachev was confronted by foreign and domestic policy problems that needed immediate addressing. A first foreign problem, of military nature, was a defence program known as the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), colloquially known by the disparaging epithet “Star Wars”. The corresponding Strategic Defence Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up within the Department of Defence in 1984. It was supposed to be a watertight missile shield consisting of anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) but also hypervelocity railguns and other kinetic energy weapons, particle beams, laser satellites and various sensor systems. Dr. Carol Rosin first used the moniker Star Wars when in an article in the Washington Post in March 1983, implying that it was an impractical science-fiction fantasy. Opponents were quick to adopt the term and that did much to harm the credibility of the programme, even though Reagan repeatedly requested for the official name to be used. Ashton Carter, a board member at MIT, assessed SDI for Congress in 1984, saying there were a number of difficulties in creating an adequate missile defence shield, with or without lasers. Carter said X-rays have a limited scope because they become diffused through the atmosphere, much like the beam of a flashlight spreading outward in all directions. This means the X-rays needed to be close to the Soviet Union, especially during the critical few minutes of the booster phase, in order for the Soviet missiles to be both detectable to radar and targeted by the lasers themselves.
Physicist Hans Bethe, who worked with Edward Teller on both the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, claimed a laser defence shield was unfeasible. He said that a defensive system was costly and difficult to build yet simple to destroy, and claimed that the Soviets could easily use thousands of decoys to overwhelm it during a nuclear attack. In response to this when Teller testified before Congress he stated that “instead of [Bethe] objecting on scientific and technical grounds, which he thoroughly understands, he now objects on the grounds of politics, on grounds of military feasibility of military deployment, on other grounds of difficult issues which are quite outside the range of his professional cognizance or mine”. In David Lorge Parnas resigned from SDIO’s Panel on Computing in Support of Battle Management, arguing in eight short papers that the software required by the Strategic Defence Initiative could never be made to be trustworthy and that such a system would inevitably be unreliable and constitute a menace to humanity in its own right. Parnas said he joined the panel with the desire to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” but soon concluded that the concept was “a fraud”.
In 1985, Gorbachev summoned his top nuclear strategists and was reassured that SDI was a bluff on Reagan’s part, whether Reagan knew it or not. Gorbachev got wind of the criticism and the unfeasibility of SDI and by 1986 he saw it as a joke rather than a threat to Soviet national security, a storm in a glass of water. In November 1985 he attended the Geneva Summit and there he announced that “the implementation of SDI is a gross violation of existing treaties that will be parried by the Soviet Union”, setting a tone for icy East-West relations. Star Wars would have been a blatant violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which forbade the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its subsequent protocol, which limited missile defences to one location per country at 100 missiles each (which the USSR had and the US did not), would have been violated by SDI ground-based interceptors. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Many viewed favouring deployment of ABM systems as an escalation rather than cessation of the nuclear arms race, and therefore a violation of this clause. Gorbachev had certainly been influenced by the attitude of his mentor Andropov toward Reagan and he viewed the latter as a populist blowhard. Gorbachev therefore threatened to unilaterally abrogate the above treaties as well as SALT I and II if SDI was implemented. Reagan had little choice but to quietly terminate his pet project and in that sense the Democratic victory in the 1986 midterm elections was convenient because the Democrat dominated Congress blocked SDI from going any further.
SDI and the perception that Reagan was the primary cause for this latest Cold War escalation, as well as Reagan’s cold attitude toward “Red China”, also caused increased unity in the communist camp. Sino-Soviet relations, in a deep freeze since the Khrushchev years, experienced a thaw when in 1985 Gorbachev held a speech in which he expressed the desire to mend relations with the People’s Republic of China. Gorbachev proposed a rearrangement of the border, recognising that the Sino-Soviet border was the result of “aggressive and morally repugnant bourgeois, imperialist games by the Tsars”. Both sides agreed that Zhenbao Island belonged to China (both sides claimed the island was under their control at the time of the agreement). On October 1st 1986 (the anniversary of the PRC), an agreement over the last 54 kilometres (34 mi) stretch of the border was reached, along with the question of islands in the Argun and Amur rivers. China was granted control over Tarabarov Island (YinlongIsland), Zhenbao Island, and approximately 50% of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island (Heixiazi Island), near Khabarovsk. Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev made reciprocal state visits and China formally joined COMECON in 1987.
In the meantime, Gorbachev had to deal with the formidable challenge of pushing Soviet economic reform further because the gerontocracy was very apprehensive of going beyond what had been done until then. He responded to that by “retiring” some of them while he rallied support in the Central Committee and the politburo by gradually introducing protégés of his own into both bodies. The result was that one day the old men woke up finding that they were a minority in the country’s highest decision-making bodies. As a result Gorbachev managed to pass measures that were radical at the time. For one, he legalized and deregulated light industry across the country (which led to the abolition of the Special Economic Zones because they were now superfluous). Soviet citizens everywhere could now open their own businesses, small and medium sized ones at least, and sell their products privately. Decisions regarding investment, production and distribution were now based on supply and demand, and prices of goods and services were determined in a free price system from now on. The free market and the woes of private entrepreneurs were now determining factors and that made the Soviet economy much more vibrant. Heavy industry, mining, the petroleum and natural gas sector, armaments production, the aerospace industry and also healthcare, education and public transportation remained state controlled and subjected to Five-Year Plans. The second major revolution was the privatization of the agricultural sector. Basing himself on the argument that the landless peasants that collectivization had to serve no longer existed, he privatized the sovkhozes, the state farms. They were now no longer subjected to state planning of any kind, were now completely free to use material incentives to boost productivity and were free to sell their products to private distributors of their own choosing. The collective farms, the kolkhozes, were turned into cooperative farms with the same freedom as the former sovkhozes.
Economic liberalization brought the need for political liberalization. For one, Gorbachev realized all too well that very strict internal and external travel restrictions on Soviet citizens conflicted with his economic reform, so he had little choice but to abolish those. Soviet entrepreneurs that exported to Europe – and there were quite many because Westerners were eager to buy cheap but sturdy Soviet consumer products over more expensive Western versions – came into contact with the world on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They naturally relayed to others what they had seen and awareness of the lack of political freedom grew, which was complemented by the fact that the size of the country’s television audience grew dramatically. It was estimated that 98% of the Soviet population watched TV by 1988. There was also the fact that increase in real income, and the subsequent option to take time off from work, allowed some to pursue intellectual hobbies much farther than they otherwise could have. Many, especially those allowed to travel outside the Eastern Bloc, came in contact with ideas contrary to communism which had long been censored, but which were impossible to keep out due to the aforementioned developments.
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I agree with Warmaster Samiel.
With Gorbachev as General Secretary and Premier, who's Chairman of the Supreme Soviet? Suslov was the last one you mentioned.
Soon we'll be able to see what happened to the other Eastern Block leaders. I know you'll get the chance to work on that.
With Gorbachev as General Secretary and Premier, who's Chairman of the Supreme Soviet? Suslov was the last one you mentioned.
Soon we'll be able to see what happened to the other Eastern Block leaders. I know you'll get the chance to work on that.
A wonderful TL
but i have some question
what happened with the communist Hardliners ?
i mean people like Marshal Sergei Sokolow or Konstantin Chernenko
there must some opposition against the Soviet Reformers.
or has General Secretary Yuri Andropov quietly dispose of them ?
On Space Flight this Soviet Union has strong economy,
So the Energia rocket /Buran Shuttle program run great in combination of MIR station ?
but i have some question
what happened with the communist Hardliners ?
i mean people like Marshal Sergei Sokolow or Konstantin Chernenko
there must some opposition against the Soviet Reformers.
or has General Secretary Yuri Andropov quietly dispose of them ?
On Space Flight this Soviet Union has strong economy,
So the Energia rocket /Buran Shuttle program run great in combination of MIR station ?
Chapter VI: Democratization and Crisis in the Eastern Bloc, 1988-1998.
Sorry for the wait, but here's an update, a little one. The rest of the Eastern Bloc also sees changes in this period, but they get their attention in the next chapter .
Gorbachev came up with multiple ways to address discontent about the political situation in the Soviet Union. For one thing, there was the tacit social agreement that as long as the current system maintained prosperity and economic growth, the rising middle class would support it. A second reform was the so-called demokratizatsiya or democratization which resulted in elections being held for the Supreme Soviet, which was the country’s parliamentary body. He empowered the Supreme Soviet which until then had been a legislative institution only in theory, in practice being a rubber stamp institution for decisions made by the party. To placate remaining hardliners, all candidates participating in the election still had to be CPSU members, but the difference was now that there were actually multiple candidates to choose from unlike during earlier elections. In 1989, semi-free democratic elections were organized on the basis of proportional representation, resulting in much greater representation of ethnic minorities. Until then, non-Russians and especially non-Slavs had been underrepresented even though minorities constituted fifty percent of the USSR’s population. That had its effects on state reforms that were taken, specifically on the empowerment of the USSR’s many sub-national entities.
In the state reform enacted in 1991 after two years of amending the 1977 Soviet constitution, significant power was devolved to sub-national parliaments to address the countries “nationalities problem”, making the USSR a federal state. The federal Soviet state retained a considerable “common heritage” that included justice, defence, police, social security, public debt and other aspects of public finances, and state-owned industries (heavy industry, mining, the petroleum and natural gas sector, armaments production, the aerospace industry, the post office and national infrastructure). The fifteen SovietSocialistRepublics or SSRs exercised competences only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, oriented towards the individuals of the dominant language: culture (including audiovisual media), education, and the use of the relevant language. The SSRs got authority in fields connected with their territory in the widest meaning of the term, thus relating to the economy, employment, health care policy, assistance of individuals, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit, and foreign trade. They supervised the districts, municipalities, and local and regional utility companies. In several fields, the different levels each got their own say on specificities. On education for instance, the autonomy of the SSRs included neither decisions about the compulsory aspect nor setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remained federal matters. Each level could be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. Such a radical decentralization was seen by Gorbachev as the only way to prevent ethnic violence in the Soviet Union.
Due to the reformism set in motion by Kosygin from 1970, the Soviet had gradually been allowed to make the steps necessary to ensure its survival and most Eastern Bloc states followed Moscow’s lead. Poland returned to its roots of “National Communism”; Hungary continued the trend of “Goulash Communism”; Czechoslovakia implemented programmes similar to Dubček’s short-lived 1968 reforms; and Bulgaria reluctantly initiated some changes too. Two Eastern Bloc states did not, the repercussions of which greatly worried Gorbachev. His own Sinatra Doctrine forbade him from just invading and enforcing compliance of his puppet states. Gorbachev had accepted Finlandization as the best way to go, meaning that the Eastern Bloc states would orient their foreign and defence policies toward Moscow but be free to determine their domestic policies. All but two governments were jubilant about the abolition of militarily enforced ideological orthodoxy, albeit for different reasons.
These two states were the German Democratic Republic under Erich Honecker and the Socialist Republic of Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. For East Germany, a strict interpretation of Marxism-Leninism was its entire raison d'être and in Romania an entire cult of personality had been built around Ceaușescu and that was irreconcilable with liberalization and democratization. The result was extreme unpopularity of both regimes among their respective subjects and a sense of pessimism, apathy and social malaise. In East Germany, totalitarian state control became ever stricter with the Stasi bugging everyone slightly suspected of harbouring hostility toward the government. Rationing was introduced to deal with the tremendous shortages produced by the country’s centrally planned economy. In Romania, rationing was even tighter. Food was rationed because of the inherent failures of a centrally planned economy (despite the fact that agricultural production actually rose) which was presented as an anti-obesity campaign. Despite being an oil-producing country, petrol was also strictly rationed and buses started to drive on methanol instead, resulting in them being derogatorily named “bombs”. And electricity was also rationed with consumption being limited to 20 kWh per family per month with anything over that being heavily taxed. Romania’s Securitate became ever more repressive while in the meantime Ceaușescu built himself the so-called “Palace of the People”, an utterly gargantuan monolith that even today is the world’s largest parliament building.
In 1987, a riot started in Braşov that was quickly repressed, resulting in the arrest and imprisonment of the protesting workers and their families being terrorized. It was hushed up, but the Romanian people got wind of it through Radio Free Europe. Protests picked up again in 1989, resulting in the Romanian Revolution in December of that year. The Romanian Revolution started in the city of Timisoara and soon spread throughout the country. It ultimately resulted in the violent overthrow and execution of long-time Romanian Communist Party leader Nicolae Ceauşescu. Street protests and violence in several Romanian cities over the course of roughly a week led the Romanian dictator to abandon power and flee Bucharest with his wife, Deputy Prime Minister Elena Ceauşescu. Captured in Târgovişte, they were tried in a show trial by a military tribunal on charges of genocide, damage to the national economy and abuse of power to execute military actions against the Romanian people. They were found guilty of all charges, and immediately executed on Christmas Day 1989, becoming the last persons ever to be condemned to death and executed in Romania. In the wake of the revolution, 1.104 people died, 162 of these occurring in the protests that took place from 16 to 22 December 1989 and brought an end to the Ceauşescu regime and the remaining 942 in the riots before the seizure of power by the Romanian military. The Romanian armed forces promised immediate democratic and economic reform and requested a 5 billion dollar loan from the Soviet Union. Ion Iliescu became President in 1990.
In 1989, following widespread public outrage over the faking of results of local government elections that spring, many citizens applied for exit visas or left the country contrary to GDR law. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had greatly relaxed border and travel restrictions and so many people left to those countries and from there to Austria or West Germany. Many others demonstrated against the ruling party, especially in the city of Leipzig. Honecker did not choose for violent repression because he feared that he would suffer the same fate as Ceauşescu and his regime, more so because there were indicators that the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army) would refuse to shoot on its own citizens. The demonstrations eventually led Honecker to resign in January 1990, by which time his position was utterly untenable, and he was replaced by a slightly more moderate communist, Egon Krenz, who promised for immediate elections and great reforms. On November 9th 1989, a few sections of the Berlin Wall were opened, resulting in thousands of East Germans crossing into West Berlin and West Germany for the first time. It was now acknowledged for the first time that reunification was inevitable, as much as many people feared the power of a reunified Germany. Gorbachev responded by initiating the “Two-Plus-Four talks” in December 1990 in Moscow. They involved both German states and the four occupational powers (the USA, the USSR, Great Britain and France). Both Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterand expressed great concerns and both sides feared that the other would have undue influence over a reunited Germany.
In the end, a gradual path toward reunification was chosen based on a number of conditions. Firstly, the USSR enforced that East German officials would not be tried for what West Germany defined as “crimes committed under the then de facto government occupying the five eastern Länder.” Secondly, both sides agreed on a completely neutral Germany as a buffer state which would have its own military and from which all four powers would withdraw. This neutral, remilitarized Germany would not be allowed to possess ABC-weapons. A united Germany would allow the East Germans to carry titles, honours ranks and degrees as professional titles and would provide state pensions accordingly. Lastly, the Germans had to recognise the Oder-Neisse border, which was a demand put forward by Polish leader Stanislaw Kania. Gorbachev wouldn’t budge on these matters and neither would Egon Krenz, and therefore these conditions were accepted because German public opinion, being pro-reunification, would be outraged if talks on reunification were cut off by the West. The West feared that disagreeing with German unification would reignite German nationalism. Next a path toward said reunification was created: East Germany would organize democratic elections in February 1991; the next step would be a currency union with a 6:1 exchange rate; that would be followed by a full-blown customs union; and then finally Germany would become a unified state on January 1st 2001.
German reunification was one of Gorbachev’s last major achievements after the economic reforms, political democratization, federalization and the Sinatra Doctrine. Gorbachev, unlike his predecessors didn’t see fit to remain in charge until his death, certainly not considering he had set the USSR on the path toward democracy. His final act was to allow parties other than the Communist Party to participate in local and regional elections (elections on the state and federal level remaining reserved for communists). In February 1998 Gorbachev announced that he’d be officially retiring on March 2nd of that year, which was his 67th birthday. That made him the first Soviet leader to both leave his office voluntarily and not die in office.
.Chapter VI: Democratization and Crisis in the Eastern Bloc, 1988-1998.
Gorbachev came up with multiple ways to address discontent about the political situation in the Soviet Union. For one thing, there was the tacit social agreement that as long as the current system maintained prosperity and economic growth, the rising middle class would support it. A second reform was the so-called demokratizatsiya or democratization which resulted in elections being held for the Supreme Soviet, which was the country’s parliamentary body. He empowered the Supreme Soviet which until then had been a legislative institution only in theory, in practice being a rubber stamp institution for decisions made by the party. To placate remaining hardliners, all candidates participating in the election still had to be CPSU members, but the difference was now that there were actually multiple candidates to choose from unlike during earlier elections. In 1989, semi-free democratic elections were organized on the basis of proportional representation, resulting in much greater representation of ethnic minorities. Until then, non-Russians and especially non-Slavs had been underrepresented even though minorities constituted fifty percent of the USSR’s population. That had its effects on state reforms that were taken, specifically on the empowerment of the USSR’s many sub-national entities.
In the state reform enacted in 1991 after two years of amending the 1977 Soviet constitution, significant power was devolved to sub-national parliaments to address the countries “nationalities problem”, making the USSR a federal state. The federal Soviet state retained a considerable “common heritage” that included justice, defence, police, social security, public debt and other aspects of public finances, and state-owned industries (heavy industry, mining, the petroleum and natural gas sector, armaments production, the aerospace industry, the post office and national infrastructure). The fifteen SovietSocialistRepublics or SSRs exercised competences only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, oriented towards the individuals of the dominant language: culture (including audiovisual media), education, and the use of the relevant language. The SSRs got authority in fields connected with their territory in the widest meaning of the term, thus relating to the economy, employment, health care policy, assistance of individuals, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit, and foreign trade. They supervised the districts, municipalities, and local and regional utility companies. In several fields, the different levels each got their own say on specificities. On education for instance, the autonomy of the SSRs included neither decisions about the compulsory aspect nor setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remained federal matters. Each level could be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. Such a radical decentralization was seen by Gorbachev as the only way to prevent ethnic violence in the Soviet Union.
Due to the reformism set in motion by Kosygin from 1970, the Soviet had gradually been allowed to make the steps necessary to ensure its survival and most Eastern Bloc states followed Moscow’s lead. Poland returned to its roots of “National Communism”; Hungary continued the trend of “Goulash Communism”; Czechoslovakia implemented programmes similar to Dubček’s short-lived 1968 reforms; and Bulgaria reluctantly initiated some changes too. Two Eastern Bloc states did not, the repercussions of which greatly worried Gorbachev. His own Sinatra Doctrine forbade him from just invading and enforcing compliance of his puppet states. Gorbachev had accepted Finlandization as the best way to go, meaning that the Eastern Bloc states would orient their foreign and defence policies toward Moscow but be free to determine their domestic policies. All but two governments were jubilant about the abolition of militarily enforced ideological orthodoxy, albeit for different reasons.
These two states were the German Democratic Republic under Erich Honecker and the Socialist Republic of Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. For East Germany, a strict interpretation of Marxism-Leninism was its entire raison d'être and in Romania an entire cult of personality had been built around Ceaușescu and that was irreconcilable with liberalization and democratization. The result was extreme unpopularity of both regimes among their respective subjects and a sense of pessimism, apathy and social malaise. In East Germany, totalitarian state control became ever stricter with the Stasi bugging everyone slightly suspected of harbouring hostility toward the government. Rationing was introduced to deal with the tremendous shortages produced by the country’s centrally planned economy. In Romania, rationing was even tighter. Food was rationed because of the inherent failures of a centrally planned economy (despite the fact that agricultural production actually rose) which was presented as an anti-obesity campaign. Despite being an oil-producing country, petrol was also strictly rationed and buses started to drive on methanol instead, resulting in them being derogatorily named “bombs”. And electricity was also rationed with consumption being limited to 20 kWh per family per month with anything over that being heavily taxed. Romania’s Securitate became ever more repressive while in the meantime Ceaușescu built himself the so-called “Palace of the People”, an utterly gargantuan monolith that even today is the world’s largest parliament building.
In 1987, a riot started in Braşov that was quickly repressed, resulting in the arrest and imprisonment of the protesting workers and their families being terrorized. It was hushed up, but the Romanian people got wind of it through Radio Free Europe. Protests picked up again in 1989, resulting in the Romanian Revolution in December of that year. The Romanian Revolution started in the city of Timisoara and soon spread throughout the country. It ultimately resulted in the violent overthrow and execution of long-time Romanian Communist Party leader Nicolae Ceauşescu. Street protests and violence in several Romanian cities over the course of roughly a week led the Romanian dictator to abandon power and flee Bucharest with his wife, Deputy Prime Minister Elena Ceauşescu. Captured in Târgovişte, they were tried in a show trial by a military tribunal on charges of genocide, damage to the national economy and abuse of power to execute military actions against the Romanian people. They were found guilty of all charges, and immediately executed on Christmas Day 1989, becoming the last persons ever to be condemned to death and executed in Romania. In the wake of the revolution, 1.104 people died, 162 of these occurring in the protests that took place from 16 to 22 December 1989 and brought an end to the Ceauşescu regime and the remaining 942 in the riots before the seizure of power by the Romanian military. The Romanian armed forces promised immediate democratic and economic reform and requested a 5 billion dollar loan from the Soviet Union. Ion Iliescu became President in 1990.
In 1989, following widespread public outrage over the faking of results of local government elections that spring, many citizens applied for exit visas or left the country contrary to GDR law. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had greatly relaxed border and travel restrictions and so many people left to those countries and from there to Austria or West Germany. Many others demonstrated against the ruling party, especially in the city of Leipzig. Honecker did not choose for violent repression because he feared that he would suffer the same fate as Ceauşescu and his regime, more so because there were indicators that the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army) would refuse to shoot on its own citizens. The demonstrations eventually led Honecker to resign in January 1990, by which time his position was utterly untenable, and he was replaced by a slightly more moderate communist, Egon Krenz, who promised for immediate elections and great reforms. On November 9th 1989, a few sections of the Berlin Wall were opened, resulting in thousands of East Germans crossing into West Berlin and West Germany for the first time. It was now acknowledged for the first time that reunification was inevitable, as much as many people feared the power of a reunified Germany. Gorbachev responded by initiating the “Two-Plus-Four talks” in December 1990 in Moscow. They involved both German states and the four occupational powers (the USA, the USSR, Great Britain and France). Both Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterand expressed great concerns and both sides feared that the other would have undue influence over a reunited Germany.
In the end, a gradual path toward reunification was chosen based on a number of conditions. Firstly, the USSR enforced that East German officials would not be tried for what West Germany defined as “crimes committed under the then de facto government occupying the five eastern Länder.” Secondly, both sides agreed on a completely neutral Germany as a buffer state which would have its own military and from which all four powers would withdraw. This neutral, remilitarized Germany would not be allowed to possess ABC-weapons. A united Germany would allow the East Germans to carry titles, honours ranks and degrees as professional titles and would provide state pensions accordingly. Lastly, the Germans had to recognise the Oder-Neisse border, which was a demand put forward by Polish leader Stanislaw Kania. Gorbachev wouldn’t budge on these matters and neither would Egon Krenz, and therefore these conditions were accepted because German public opinion, being pro-reunification, would be outraged if talks on reunification were cut off by the West. The West feared that disagreeing with German unification would reignite German nationalism. Next a path toward said reunification was created: East Germany would organize democratic elections in February 1991; the next step would be a currency union with a 6:1 exchange rate; that would be followed by a full-blown customs union; and then finally Germany would become a unified state on January 1st 2001.
German reunification was one of Gorbachev’s last major achievements after the economic reforms, political democratization, federalization and the Sinatra Doctrine. Gorbachev, unlike his predecessors didn’t see fit to remain in charge until his death, certainly not considering he had set the USSR on the path toward democracy. His final act was to allow parties other than the Communist Party to participate in local and regional elections (elections on the state and federal level remaining reserved for communists). In February 1998 Gorbachev announced that he’d be officially retiring on March 2nd of that year, which was his 67th birthday. That made him the first Soviet leader to both leave his office voluntarily and not die in office.
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Not sure what National Communism and Goulash Communism are. Who did you have in mind to replace Gorbachev as head of this alternate USSR?