AHC: A More Successful Soviet Union

By successful, I don't mean as in steamrolling every country to spread the glorious revolution, I mean as in creating a happy populace who were not in fear of the government, were well fed, etc. Was this ever possible, or would it require a fundamental change in government (i.e. Menshevik) early on?
 
Isn't steamrolling every country to spread the glorious revolution basically the Raison d'être from the start ?

(I think you can have a
I mean as in creating a happy populace who were not in fear of the government, were well fed, etc
but its not the USSR its just another Russian republic)
 
This is the kind of question which everyone is just going to answer according to their personal political convinctions in a black-and-white manner.
 

Deleted member 1487

I mean the Soviets considered that to get the revolution off the ground they'd need at a minimum to 'liberate' Germany, which would help it industrialize. So they'd probably have to conquer Germany in the 1920s, which means defeating Poland too and linking up with the Hungarians so they have a more developed trade bloc. The problem is you cannot get around the secret police given the Russian Civil War and problems that caused; they had to impose communism in the USSR, not rely on a popular revolution. The Mensheviks would be a better route, but even they would need to defeat the Whites and other factions. They'd probably have to abandon their war support and Lenin would have to die. With a weaker Bolshevik party they'd have to hope they could subsume them and take on some of their popular issues like the anti-war stance. Really they'd have much of the same thing the Soviets did to win and stay in power, which means much the same history minus Lenin and probably Stalin.
 
Well, for one you can take Stalin out of the picture in late twenties, as it would give his opponents a free hand(or at least not a bullet in the skull) in soviet government, which wouldn't avert forced collectivization per se, but it would mean that much less forceful and more voluntary approach would be made. Thus, it should eliminate the cause of 1931-1933 hunger, and would mean that about 8 million citizens would be alive. Not to mention their children later on, as demographic transition was in full swing.
The absence of paranoiac the level of Stalin at the head of the government would most probably mean no 1937 purges, which, depending on your believe in competence of Soviet RCW and post-RCW military stuff, would rather mean that even if soviet industrial power base would be less then with alive Stalin(which is not a given), not so much of equipment would be lost in the early days of Barbarossa.
Also, I'd think that without a Tsar-like/Furher/whatever-you-call-it totalitarian leader figure which alone makes all decisions, the soviet leadership would probably be less inclined to play Hitler's game, which throws another miliion of butterflies. Not to mention the loose probability of Hitler at all.
 
Simple. Have the 1991 coup not happen (for any reason) and therefore Gorbachev signs the New Union treaty with the SSR leaders, and transitions the Union into a democratic socialist nation as he originally planned.
 
I think the best chance for a successful USSR takes a POD in about 1960. (I've always thought the currency reform of 1961 was the perfect chance.) Perhaps Khrushchev stays in power or at least someone other than Brezhnev succeeds him.
 
I'd say the key here is to have Kosygin, rather than Brezhnev come to power. Whilst not all of Kosygin's economic reforms were successful, they weren't disastrous, and they showed a greater desire to experiment with new forms of economic management. By contrast Brezhnev was a dinosaur and chnaged essentially nothing, which is what was responsible for the Brezhnev-era stagnation. The calcification of the Soviet economy under his leadership was essentially irreversible without dragging the Soviet Union into a freefall.
 
By successful, I don't mean as in steamrolling every country to spread the glorious revolution, I mean as in creating a happy populace who were not in fear of the government, were well fed, etc. Was this ever possible, or would it require a fundamental change in government (i.e. Menshevik) early on?

It was possible and was achieved, historically, in the 1950s with the final end of famines.

yours,
Sam R.
 
According to Russiapedia, there were 2.5 million in the gulags in the early '50s. Beginning in 1950, they gave you a plate. They gave you enough food to live, if you filled your work quota. The gulags were liquidated by 1960. From then on, you had to do something to end up in a gulag, no longer called a gulag. People were sure happy to get out.
 
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