A rump Soviet Union (without Ukraine) survives after 1991

CaliGuy

Banned
What if Russian leader Boris Yeltsin would have agreed to have Russia sign a new Union Treaty in December 1991 even without Ukraine?

For the record, in this TL, a rump Soviet Union (as in, without Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states, and possibly Azerbaijan as well) would survive after 1991.
 
What if Russian leader Boris Yeltsin would have agreed to have Russia sign a new Union Treaty in December 1991 even without Ukraine?

For the record, in this TL, a rump Soviet Union (as in, without Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states, and possibly Azerbaijan as well) would survive after 1991.
Baltic states hardly. Otherwise referendm mostly went for Union.
 
Baltic states hardly. Otherwise referendm mostly went for Union.

That referendum was held in March 1991. It was ancient history after the failed August coup. By late 1991, even the republics that were not openly declaring independence were demanding a devolution so extreme it amounted to de facto independence.
 
What if Russian leader Boris Yeltsin would have agreed to have Russia sign a new Union Treaty in December 1991 even without Ukraine?

For the record, in this TL, a rump Soviet Union (as in, without Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states, and possibly Azerbaijan as well) would survive after 1991.
Killing off Yeltsin would help.
 
I am not an expert on the subject but I imagine that the republics would have to have a strong incentive to stay in such a union. Whether this is the result of outside threats, or some economic promises or something else.
 
Only way it gets done is with no August Coup. Even after the complete collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the multitude of crises facing the USSR, the union was still salvageable up till the August Coup. The Baltic States were certainly gone, likely Georgia, possibly Ukraine and Moldova, but some kind of federation could have been reconstituted. It wouldn't have been communist, it was far too late at this point. But once the August Coup happens everyone pretty much gave up on the idea of keeping the Soviet Republics together in anything stronger than a loose regional commonwealth.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
That referendum was held in March 1991. It was ancient history after the failed August coup. By late 1991, even the republics that were not openly declaring independence were demanding a devolution so extreme it amounted to de facto independence.
If so, why didn't they just demand outright independence like Ukraine did?
 

gaijin

Banned
I suspect it would have helped limiting some of the economic disruption of the 90's. The Soviet Union was one huge economic zone with production chains and markets interconnected. Having all of these suddenly in different countries did not help in the economic transition.

What basically happened was comparable to an EU wide brexit but instead of having two or more years to work out the details you have six months. At the same time you are trying to change from a planned economy to a market economy. There is no way that does not end in chaos, and even today I am completely flabbergasted how the "experts" who came up with these ideas back then thought the result could be anything but economic chaos.
 

Louyan

Banned
even today I am completely flabbergasted how the "experts" who came up with these ideas back then thought the result could be anything but economic chaos.

My take is that it was perhaps a combination of economic religiosity (The Invisible Hand of the Market will take care of everything and even if there will be problems and suffering it will be worth it), opportunism (there is profit here, more chaos, more easy to pillage) and malice (shred them now and they will cause no problems in the future).
 
I'm not sure it would have been plausible to expect better advice. Poland, for instance, had made a relative success of shock therapy, returning to economic growth as early as 1992. Most expected a turnaround in Eurasia that would not be much less rapid--the Baltic States, for instance, managed to keep pace with the central Europeans. The depth of the post-Soviet economic depression, and its length, was not something many had expected.

Much of the shock would have been inevitable. I think that the space of the Soviet Union may have been saved from worse than OTL because of the political independence of the different units. What if these republics remained yoked together while the Soviet/Eurasian economy was falling apart? Yugoslavia had seen less economic dysfunction, and rivalry, in the 1980s, and look how that ended up. If different republics in a union were competing for scarce and diminishing resources and blaming each other, things could have gone very badly. As independent states, the different Soviet successor states only had themselves to blame.

Going back to the original WI, of a federation of Russia with Belarus and the Central Asian republics, I'm skeptical that Russia would have been behind it. With Ukraine included, the Union would have made some sense by way of burden-sharing. Without Ukraine, Russia would find itself the dominant player in a union with kindred but much smaller Belarus, with a half-Russian Kazakhstan, and with much poorer Central Asian republics. Russia would have been in the position of financing the union and probably all of the smaller republics.
 
If so, why didn't they just demand outright independence like Ukraine did?

By the time of the Ukrainian independence referendum in December 1991 (which incidentally merely confirmed what the Supreme Council of Ukraine had already decided after the August coup), *every* Soviet republic except Russia and Kazakhstan had declared its independence. See the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Soviet_states The only distinction was between those who saw independence as compatible with some extremely loose grouping such as the Commonwealth of Independent States was to be, and those who, like the Baltic states, wanted no part even of that.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
My take is that it was perhaps a combination of economic religiosity (The Invisible Hand of the Market will take care of everything and even if there will be problems and suffering it will be worth it), opportunism (there is profit here, more chaos, more easy to pillage) and malice (shred them now and they will cause no problems in the future).

My take (with my perhaps naive anti-conspiratorial nature) is that it was overwhelmingly economic religiosity, with a small dose of opportunism on the part of western advisors and virtually no malice or deliberate sabotage. Most of the westerners who were opportunists were probably deceiving themselves as much as anyone else, out of economic religiosity (great term by the way), not really seeing themselves as pillagers, and hardly any thought they would be making Russia weaker than it would otherwise be.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
By the time of the Ukrainian independence referendum in December 1991 (which incidentally merely confirmed what the Supreme Council of Ukraine had already decided after the August coup), *every* Soviet republic except Russia and Kazakhstan had declared its independence. See the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Soviet_states The only distinction was between those who saw independence as compatible with some extremely loose grouping such as the Commonwealth of Independent States was to be, and those who, like the Baltic states, wanted no part even of that.
First of all, why didn't Kazakhstan declare independence before December 1991?

Secondly, wasn't the Commonwealth of Independent States initially (before Ukraine refused to participate) expected to have a more powerful supranational component to it? After all, this is what Putin said about the initial expectations of the CIS in March 2014:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26652058

"Many people both in Russia and in Ukraine, as well as in other republics hoped that the Commonwealth of Independent States that was created at the time would become the new common form of statehood. They were told that there would be a single currency, a single economic space, joint armed forces; however, all this remained empty promises, while the big country was gone. It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered."

Finally, it is safe to say that, after August 1991, the Central Asian countries tried playing a double-game? After all, they simultaneously expressed support for some kind of loose union (possibly to get money and economic concessions from Russia) while also declaring independence.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
I'm not sure it would have been plausible to expect better advice. Poland, for instance, had made a relative success of shock therapy, returning to economic growth as early as 1992. Most expected a turnaround in Eurasia that would not be much less rapid--the Baltic States, for instance, managed to keep pace with the central Europeans. The depth of the post-Soviet economic depression, and its length, was not something many had expected.

Much of the shock would have been inevitable. I think that the space of the Soviet Union may have been saved from worse than OTL because of the political independence of the different units. What if these republics remained yoked together while the Soviet/Eurasian economy was falling apart? Yugoslavia had seen less economic dysfunction, and rivalry, in the 1980s, and look how that ended up. If different republics in a union were competing for scarce and diminishing resources and blaming each other, things could have gone very badly. As independent states, the different Soviet successor states only had themselves to blame.

Couldn't one argue the opposite, though? Specifically, couldn't one argue that the economic interdependence of the Soviet Union disrupted a lot of trade links which connected the various SSRs after they became independent and thus caused the economic crisis that resulted from the transition to capitalism to become more severe than it would have otherwise been?

Going back to the original WI, of a federation of Russia with Belarus and the Central Asian republics, I'm skeptical that Russia would have been behind it. With Ukraine included, the Union would have made some sense by way of burden-sharing. Without Ukraine, Russia would find itself the dominant player in a union with kindred but much smaller Belarus, with a half-Russian Kazakhstan, and with much poorer Central Asian republics. Russia would have been in the position of financing the union and probably all of the smaller republics.

Excellent point!
 
Couldn't one argue the opposite, though? Specifically, couldn't one argue that the economic interdependence of the Soviet Union disrupted a lot of trade links which connected the various SSRs after they became independent and thus caused the economic crisis that resulted from the transition to capitalism to become more severe than it would have otherwise been?

That could be a complicating factor, and I think people recognized the disruption of Communist-era trade links as a problem for post-Communist Europe generally.

That said, I think it was thought that the gain from new rationalized trade networks would be achieved quickly, for the former satellite states as much as for the former Soviet republics. Independence, if anything, was thought to be a likely trigger for the sorts of reforms needed for the Soviet republics to quickly transition to the West. Ukraine, for instance, had been expected to follow the Baltic States in quickly Westernizing and moving towards Europe once it was out of the Union.

In the case of a rump Soviet Union that survives, the 1990s' economic crash is likely to recur just as in our timeline. In this timeline, the different republics of the Union will be forced to deal with the task of keeping a federation composed of very different and unequal republics going, on top of everything else.
 
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