The liberals are far and few between, but that doesn't mean they are nonexistent. I'd like to again point at Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin is also an example, and I'd count in his supporters too.
In a large country there were surely some people who actually met your criteria as liberals. But most people didn't, especially not before 1985. Gorbachev, Yeltsin and famous liberal advisors did not start out as liberals. They became more liberal (and some became actual ideological capital L liberals) under the conditions of Gorbachev's rule.
I actually kind of agree with you - all those factors will certainly lead to a major decrease in Soviet power. But the rise of liberalism can be attributed to dissatisfaction with the old system, which brought about the traditionalists and separatists. With Yeltsin getting as much power as he did, all those factions will lead to the collapse of the USSR. It's not an iron destiny, I certainly don't believe in a 100% certain fate. But I'd say it has a very good chance of coming out true, in my opinion.
The thing is, the Yeltsin-era liberalism was a product of the Gorbachev era. Before that, the Soviets were looking at their European satellites and to a lesser extent China and feeling that they were being left behind. That they needed to get better at Socialism. When you go back and read diaries and talk to people who lived during the era, the unease that was growing among the younger generation during the late 70s and early 80s was that Hungary and Poland were outperforming them and that Brezhnev and the other old men were letting them down. They were thinking "maybe we should try the more liberal style of Socialism practiced in these other countries" not that "we should institute market capitalism".
I don't think the development from "we should get better at socialism" to "we should adopt social democracy" to "we should cut the breaks and try to become as much like the Americans as we can" was at all inevitable, especially since even under Yeltsin, there were very few people who were actual liberals. Rather, I think the development occurred in just a few years under specific conditions, and different conditions would lead to different (though perhaps similar, depending on how similar the conditions were) ideas developing.
There were plans to change up the planning of the USSR (OGAS, cybernetic socialism) but due to initial resistance; disagreements on how it'd be implemented, that didn't really get have a chance until the 80s, and by then it was killed by the liberals (Gorbachev dismissed the predictions of computer modeling that economic liberal reforms would destroy the economy).
Quite fairly, really. The Soviet Union didn't have the electronics industry required to implement OGAS, and if they'd tried and put a large effort into building out such a capacity, it would have taken about 20 years to implement and the systems would have been obsolete within a couple of years of starting, so decades obsolete by the time it was fully rolled out.
There were other ideas about how to shake up the planning system, and since the Stalin years, power had shifted several times. Mostly these changes only made the planning system worse, not so much because everyone was trying bad ideas, but simply because reforms were implemented in too little time to actually bed in or because compromises at the top meant that instead of sticking with the old way or making major changes, instead half an idea would be implemented. This all increased the amount of confusion and got in the way of effective planning. On top of this Khrushchev and Brezhnev both decentralized power away from the planners and towards enterprise managers both by official policy and also by accident. For example, Brezhnev allowed enterprise managers to stay in their jobs longer, which allowed them to build extensive local political power bases beyond anything possible during the Stalin or Khrushchev years. Since enterprises were also in charge of housing their workers and providing other such basic services, enterprise managers had significant of leverage to change plans, and could call GOSPLAN or call their political friends and say "well, this plan is rather unreasonable. to install these new tools I'd need to stop the factory for the next 8 months, and if we aren't producing for 8 months I won't be able to guarantee that I'll be able to keep all of my workers housed, please my friend, can't you change the goal a bit so there isn't a crisis here with unhoused workers?"
The main problem with the planning system was that it never broke from Stalinist ideas of how to measure and reward output. This wasn't for lack of trying - Kosygin notably had tried to shift the Soviets towards a system where each enterprise was measured by how much value they added, but Brezhnev watered down the reforms and there are arguments about whether Kosygin had the right approach to achieving that useful goal anyway (some of the authors I've read have been very scathing about the details of Kosygin's original proposals, but none have ever gone into detail about what was wrong with Kosygin's original plan). In any case, the final result was an over-complicated set of goals that everyone just ignored, so even though Stalinist goals to produce more regardless of cost or quantity were no longer the written rule, they continued to be the custom.
So changes were happening that effected how the planning system worked, though whether they did any good is debatable. Also, there were alternatives between Brezhnev-era planning, cybernetic socialism and full market liberalism that would have made things better.
Things don't always immediately lead to collapse. On their own, none of those would ever lead to the collapse of the USSR. But it was a combination of multiple factors, the ones I mentioned that led to that, over a period of time. I forgot to mention that the USSR was also building new infrastructure to replace the stuff they built in the Urals, which cost the USSR a lot of money since it was already operating at full capacity and was based on capital-intensive expansion. I don't know enough about the USSR to say if that is true or not, but if you know anything about it I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
The Soviets indeed over-invested in minor cities and developing resource extraction in Siberia and then moving the resources by train to where the old factories were (shipping coal from Siberia to the Donbas steel mills was a huge stress on the rail network and a major cost - indeed, before 1985 pretty much all of the decline in overall productivity growth in the USSR was the steel industry becoming less productive as the coal and iron ore deposits in the western Soviet Union grew less economical and Siberian sources were developed to replace them).
On top of that, the Soviets cheaped out on development during the Brezhnev years by trying to upgrade existing factories with new tools - this failed because to stop a factory to change the tooling meant the enterprise manager would loose his bonus for the period the enterprise wasn't producing due to upgrades going on, and because in many cases the new tools couldn't even fit in the old buildings. So when the Soviet Union fell, people would go on factory tours and see a bunch of tooling from the 1950s, while tooling that was only about a decade old was piled in some old shed out back.
And one of the deepest rooted economic problems in the Soviet Union was its addiction to capital investments. The systemic failure to properly account for the value added to the economy by the service sector (which is not a uniquely Soviet problem - it exists in a less severe form in Western Capitalism) led to lop-sided growth, where investments in productive capital would produce larger economic surpluses, and the lions share of those surpluses would be plowed back into yet more capital investment. This resulted in an ever larger portion of the economy being devoted to building factories, railroads, streets, nuclear reactors and so on. This resulted in much necessary work getting done - the development of the Siberian oil and gas industry was useful, as was the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline - but at the costs of even more necessary work getting done, like shortages of plumbers, electricians and removals men who could help people turn the concrete boxes of new-built housing into actual homes more efficiently. From start to end, capital investment consumed more and more of Soviet GNP every year. It was kind of like a cancer that laid golden eggs.
If you want the USSR to remain as a political entity, it is much easier... But if you want to keep it at the same height, or higher, to create a healthy and functioning country it will be more difficult. You will need something on the scale of the Cultural Revolution for that
For sure. This conversation started with a discussion about how likely Soviet collapse was though. Giant-sized North Korea and a Soviet Union that successfully reforms but has economic growth on par with post 1990 Japan might both be considered to be failures as far as "keeping the USSR at the same height", but to my mind are also forms of Soviet survival.
All empires must fall one day, all nations must in time be forgotten as they are replaced by new identities. The Soviet Union could never be immortal, but I don't think it had to die in 1991. Whether or not its destiny after 1991 were happy or not is a separate question.
It basically goes from the Grobachev era to a Putin/Orban style “illiberal democracy” without the Yeltsin period in between (partly because I killed Yeltsin)
Eh, I would say that Yeltsin was also an illiberal democrat. Remember, this is a guy who held power because he turned tanks onto the Russian parliament and hand-picked Putin as his successor.
On another note...
@nixonshead,
I may have an idea of why your choice of PoD appealed to me so much! Came across that old thread of mine while researching another aerospace WI.
fasquardon
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