Is it possible to add more years of life, up to and including a decade or more, to the USSR and Warsaw Pact?
By surviving "Warsaw Pact" I don't mean all original members need to remain in a military alignment with the USSR (for example, Poland or Hungary might drop out) but at a minimum, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria remain in the alliance.
How could Soviet and Central European Communism halt its own disintegration at this late stage?
Will the Chinese, newly estranged (in political terms) from the west over suppression of the Tiananmen Square movement, become as friendly with the ATL Soviet Union and remains of the "Soviet bloc" as they did with post-communist Russia during the 1990s and beyond?
Or was OTL China only willing to purchase arms from Russia, settle territorial disputes along status quo lines, form the Shanghai Cooperation organization and collaborate with Russia more in international fora because the full collapse of the USSR and Soviet Communist Party rendered Russia much more harmless?
In this context, it is important to remember that in OTL, the PRC had a degree of military collaboration with the US during the 1980s and was engaged in proxy struggles against the USSR in Afghanistan and Cambodia up to 1989.
By surviving "Warsaw Pact" I don't mean all original members need to remain in a military alignment with the USSR (for example, Poland or Hungary might drop out) but at a minimum, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria remain in the alliance.
How could Soviet and Central European Communism halt its own disintegration at this late stage?
Will the Chinese, newly estranged (in political terms) from the west over suppression of the Tiananmen Square movement, become as friendly with the ATL Soviet Union and remains of the "Soviet bloc" as they did with post-communist Russia during the 1990s and beyond?
Or was OTL China only willing to purchase arms from Russia, settle territorial disputes along status quo lines, form the Shanghai Cooperation organization and collaborate with Russia more in international fora because the full collapse of the USSR and Soviet Communist Party rendered Russia much more harmless?
In this context, it is important to remember that in OTL, the PRC had a degree of military collaboration with the US during the 1980s and was engaged in proxy struggles against the USSR in Afghanistan and Cambodia up to 1989.