Any input welcome.Please posit any ideas&suggestions that could cause such an outcome to occur.Bonus points if featuring an exodus of Russian Military&Civilians(this could constitute a brain drain in Russia)that still consider themselves People of the Soviet Union&want to live in a socialist society choosing to flee to the remaining SSR's away from Yeltsins new land of anarchy&gangsters.Maybe include Russian Towns,Cities&Military Facilities on SSR borders seceding from Russia to merge with the new USSR?
AH Challenge:After the 91 Coup,Have the other SSR's maintain the USSR without Russia.
- Thread starter omnimercurial
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Perhaps in central Asia - I don't know the situation on the ground there - but the European and Caucasian republics are going to go. There was a huge democratic movement in the Baltic republics and (I think) Ukraine, and Communism had apparently never gained much support in the Caucuses (sp?) either, from the look of it post-Communism.
HeavyWeaponsGuy
Banned
This idea is difficult enough to make.
It's impossible, short of some sort of insane natural disaster like a meteor striking the RSFSR, there is no way the Russians are going to let the Siberian oil fields go to China, they'll defend it by force. The Russians might be falling apart, but compared to the PLA they have the advantage. If all else fails, Beijing knows just as well as Moscow that the nuclear option hasn't gone anywhere. Jiang Zemin was an intelligent Chinese leader who was moderate and presided over the mostly peaceful expansion of China's role on the world stage, he's not completely insane.
Making something like the CIS be more than just a loose economic coalition is possible.
Making the breakup of the Soviet Union more clean or even having some SSRs break apart while other nations remain tied to the Supreme Soviet is very possible (note: Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltics are for sure gone barring extraordinary changes that for some may go back all the way to their addition to the Soviet Union).
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Laurentia
Banned
Those Russian nukes? After the breakup of the USSR? They all go to Russia. Russia will quite literally tell China to fuck off, and unless they want every Chinese city glassed, they will oblige.
Since you asked, I think you mean "Caucasus." And you're right about the popularity of Communism in those places. I remember watching those events unfold, and the one thing I don't remember ANYONE asking is whether the Soviet Union could be continued without Russia, or even if anyone would WANT to.
Pretty much this. The RSFSR is the only republic capable of enforcing and projecting any power within the Soviet Union. If it left, there's literally no way any republic could maintain the USSR. I would consider this impossible, but if you had to go anywhere back for a PoD, I would go to the 1920's, pre-Stalin. Avoid Russification policies and famine in Ukraine and Central Asia. Have Beria take the reins eventually, and he'll pursue a policy of strengthening the Caucasus republics and the Central Asian ones. OTL, he set the precedence by allowing local leaders in such as in his native Georgia as opposed to Russians (with his admittedly short rule.
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Georgia will have nothing to do with any restructured SSR, they were already aiming to leave. At the very best you could maybe have the Central Asian States unite into a single union, as a nuclear-armed state. Beyond that I really don't see how it is possible.
HeavyWeaponsGuy
Banned
Yeah... as I recall the 1920's was primarily not about Russification and instead marked an immensely liberal time in regards to treatment of Soviet nationalities in regards to letting them learn their own languages and such.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Speaking as an enthusiast and promoter of small languages, 'letting them learn' doesn't cover half of it. The Soviets were creating nations. There was very little native literature and literacy in Central Asia's newly-established languages, so they sent Tatar Bolsheviks their to establish it - so that for some time the voice of the Uzbek proletariat bore the legend 'Tramps of the world, unite!' thanks to subtle inter-Turkic differences of meaning.
Belarussian peasants were incredulously explained, in Belarussian, that they only spoke 'Russian' (which to them meant the language of Orthodox east Slavs in their district). Jewish children in Odessa were shoved reluctantly into new Yiddish-speaking schools.The overall legacy was positive, but not without shades of absurdity. Imagine that in the present, it was immediately decided that all Scottish government paperwork should be in broad Lallans.
'Letting them learn their own languages' would be true of the languages of the SSR-nationalities for the entire Soviet period.
HeavyWeaponsGuy
Banned
Yeah but take a look at what happened to some of those languages.
I have a favorite professor who is a speaker of Tajik, an area that has predominantly spent most of its history influenced by the Persians and only very recently fell under Russian and later Soviet influence.
The language could be mock Russian if you didn't see what the characters looked like.
I respect the Soviet nationality policies vis-a-vis language, especially early on, it was later when they were more into Russification that it just became unfortunate.
I have a favorite professor who is a speaker of Tajik, an area that has predominantly spent most of its history influenced by the Persians and only very recently fell under Russian and later Soviet influence.
The language could be mock Russian if you didn't see what the characters looked like.
I respect the Soviet nationality policies vis-a-vis language, especially early on, it was later when they were more into Russification that it just became unfortunate.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Come again? I speak a bit of Russian and if I look at, say, this it's meaningless and I can immediately tell it's not Russian.
In many SSRs largely Russophone urban communities appeared where the intermixture of people from different SSRs and the needs of professional of military-industrial employment made Russian the common language. But I've never heard anything about 'Russification' meaning making the language more Russian except in the single odd case of Belarussian, which is itself very open to debate.
In fact I recall that an anecdote - perhaps untrue - said that under nativisation 'party line' was rendered in Central Asian languages as 'Shah's road'. This was of course an example defending the use of imported Russianism to refer to their mechanisms of Soviet civilisation - but what of that? Gaelic words for modern technology are almost all English-derived. Much Russian vocabulary is actually French.
In many SSRs largely Russophone urban communities appeared where the intermixture of people from different SSRs and the needs of professional of military-industrial employment made Russian the common language. But I've never heard anything about 'Russification' meaning making the language more Russian except in the single odd case of Belarussian, which is itself very open to debate.
In fact I recall that an anecdote - perhaps untrue - said that under nativisation 'party line' was rendered in Central Asian languages as 'Shah's road'. This was of course an example defending the use of imported Russianism to refer to their mechanisms of Soviet civilisation - but what of that? Gaelic words for modern technology are almost all English-derived. Much Russian vocabulary is actually French.
I wasn't saying that Russification started in the 1920s. However, the beginnings of it are there, beginning with the centralization of power in the RSFSR (if you want to go further, it was a general trend throughout Russian colonial history towards Russian chauvinism). You would essentially have to make such a notion stillborn if you want to take away Russia from the Soviet equation as the OP is putting forth.
Thande
Donor
It's a cool idea but I can't see it happening in 1991, except perhaps in Central Asia and you'd have to have a situation where one strongman dominates the others.
I did once do a map with a similar concept but with the idea that there's a counter-revolution in Russia in the 1970s and Russia becomes a non-communist, theoretically democratic federation while the SSRs around the fringes continue the USSR and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe maintain the Warsaw Pact.
I did once do a map with a similar concept but with the idea that there's a counter-revolution in Russia in the 1970s and Russia becomes a non-communist, theoretically democratic federation while the SSRs around the fringes continue the USSR and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe maintain the Warsaw Pact.
I Blame Communism
Banned
I don't think the idea of the OP is particularly plausible. But as it relates to Russian imperial history history I don't agree at all. Eighteenth-century Russian not only put up with elites that were non-Russian to one degree or another (the Baltic German and Polish cases are especially noteworthy since when Russian armies had called on these places in previous centuries these classes had been running or fighting for their lives: the Russian empire of Peter meant more-or-less abandoning any claim that Orthodox East Slavs had a special place in the empire or the world), but actively promoted them in order to integrate them with the imperial state.
Nobody without a good idea of the distinction between Rus' and Rossiya can hope to understand the history of identities in what we in English rather inadequately call 'Russia'.