Need Russian Input
We seem to have selected Beria as our man for top-down political reform to make a less-socialist paradise happen.
IMNSHO top-down economic and political reform campaigns were attempted twice IOTL with Khrushchev and Gorbachev and failed miserably for different reasons.
I subscribe to a view that any group of people can learn and do anything competently, but the USSR had a slew of fundamental issues that compromised its ability to compete.
For one, thing, you need information exchange to be relatively free for meaningful feedback and THAT was hardly ever a functional aspect of Soviet society.
Part of that problem is that prices were a matter of official fiat, not affected by economic reality. Having the ruble being a convertible (and freely traded) currency would’ve made things a lot easier.
Let’s say Beria institutes a glasnost policy after WW2 that frees up Soviet access to the rest of the world and sponsors a Meiji-level fostering of expertise in foreign markets, technologies, and politics.
The fruits of that policy would take a long time to make themselves known, given the essentially feudal nature of Soviet industry with all kinds of vested interests in the status quo from the 1930’s-1950’s made adapting to the faster pace of technological change very problematic after WW2. Since Soviet industry was not answerable to anyone outside the Politburo, the ideas of marketing abroad, quality control, and floor-up innovation that the Japanese and others embraced in the modern era were alien concepts. Imagine Walter J Deming a Hero of Socialist Industry!
The funny thing about that is that you have to make it worthwhile for Soviets to come back and foreigners to set up shop in the Soviet Union and allow a culture of entrepreneurship to get and stay going from the bottom up by embracing intellectual property rights, education abroad, rule of law in commerce, individual initiative, and funding said ventures. I could see a Beria or Khrushchev attempt to get EEC/EFTA associate membership for the USSR (and even try their trick of various SSRs and Pact “allies” bidding for entry as well to increase their voting power) in the 1960’s under this scheme.
Gosplan would evolve into MITI and essentially a mixture of economic intelligence unit, R&D funding clearinghouse, chamber of commerce, export-import bank, and SBA to make it easier for Soviet business to compete in the international arena. The Politburo would evolve into a Duma that allows for representative parties and coalition politics to emerge in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
A look at the Asian tigers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan) is informative as to how authoritarian regimes can embrace economic modernity without significant political change for decades, though the watershed of the 1990’s where nobody felt externally threatened by Communism anymore allowed for political liberalization as well.
The beauty and terror of guided industrial and commercial development is that usually the selected technologies and markets targeted evolve too damned fast for a detailed plan to be executed as planned initially.
Japan’s a cautionary tale as far as that goes. Could the Soviets have succeeded as well and made the same mistakes? Who knows?
Still, it seems as if the Soviets could have done darned near anything else from 1950-1990 by doing some to all of the above tactics to be more economically viable.
If the USSR were more economically viable, it would be politically unrecognizable by the 1980’s. IDK if the various ethnicities could play nicer together, but I could definitely see pushes for a lot more local control of education, environmental affairs, and so forth.