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Your challenge is to make the Sino-Soviet mend happen before 1985 with a POD no earlier than 1964. The mend is defined as the thaw in relations between Russia/China that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. It took the form of the 1991 Border Treaty and the subsequent rise in commerce between the two nations. The ATL thaw must look roughly similar to this. I think the challenge is possible. Deng Xiaoping was an arch-pragmatist, and I think that there were people in the Soviet leadership who, had they been in charge, could have foreseen that their position wasn't strong enough to take on two arch rivals at once (NATO and the PRC) while trying to export their ideology abroad through proxy wars. One of those two might have made an overture, or seem common ground.

The second part to this challenge (you may do only one of the two if you see fit, though brownie points for both) is to somehow improve the Soviet economy, or at least reduce the drag on it within the same time parameters (before 1985 but not before 1964). An earlier Sino-Soviet mend would be helpful by itself, because it would reduce the need for the SU to keep a gigantic military force on the Chinese border. Arms deals like the ones they made in the nineties and some natural gas deals like the "Power of Siberia" they're doing now could have been really helpful.

The other big opportunity I see is in agricultural reform that actually works. As we all know, the overwhelming majority of Soviet agriculture was collectivized, and only 4% of Soviet farmland was held in private plots. However, said private plots produced somewhere between a quarter to a third of total Soviet produce. Even that doesn't tell the full story of how inefficient collectivization was, because the collectives got all the resources (machinery especially), while private plots, based on my reading, seem to have been something collective farm workers tended to by hand in their spare time. Imagine if somebody in charge had been smart enough to observe this and realize the implications. Let's say that over the course of five years, the Soviets partially privatize agriculture and have 40% of their land privatized at the end of that five year period. That could have increased the Soviet agricultural yield to 2.5 to 3.3 times what it was in OTL by itself, without including what the other 60% of collectivized farmland was producing, however inefficiently. The implications of that would have been huge. The Soviet Union was always short on almost everything, but it only really started having serious food shortages towards the end, in the 1980s. Historically, populations ruled over by despots will put up with a lot out of fear, but when the food runs low, that's when the pitchforks come out. There are exceptions like Zimbabwe and North Korea, but that seems to be true more often than not. Had the Soviets not had that problem (at least as badly), they could have been in a much better place. Foreign grain purchases were the main thing the Soviets spent their foreign currency reserves on, and it made them more dependent on the West. Obviously that's another area where they're strengthened.

Finally, being able to do away with (at least partially, and eventually maybe completely) with collectivization would have freed up enormous human capital for other, more productive, projects. The Soviets had maybe millions of people working in collective agriculture, and if they had been able to free up some of that, they could have used those people for a lot of more productive stuff (basically anything except what they were actually doing OTL). Maybe building some real infrastructure, natural resource exploitation, etc. An interesting possibility is whether a Soviet Union that made the described reforms would have been able to imitate Deng Xiaoping's reforms. For a variety of reasons, Deng-style reforms weren't really possible in the OTL Soviet Union. China's economic renaissance was based on cheap, low-income agrarian labor doing stuff in China that couldn't be done as competitively in the West. The Soviet Union couldn't imitate that because it was a middle income country with a lot of skilled laborers. That's not what China based their blueprint on. All of that freed up rural labour, though, would have created enough parallel between China and the SU that I think the Soviets could have mimicked their reforms with at least partial success.

I am thinking of doing a story that features these things as elements, and I was interested to ask what other people thought. I promise to credit you if anything does come of it and I use your ideas :)

I may have set out a hard order, but have at it!
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