Alternate 21st Century: What if the Soviet Union didn't collapse

"It is difficult to establish the total economic cost of the disaster. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union spent 18 billion rubles (the equivalent of US$18 billion at that time) on containment and decontamination, virtually bankrupting itself."

It's a significant loss, but the Soviets could recuperate purely on their oil experts, which were pretty lucrative.
 
"It is difficult to establish the total economic cost of the disaster. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union spent 18 billion rubles (the equivalent of US$18 billion at that time) on containment and decontamination, virtually bankrupting itself."

It's not as if Gorbachev had any reason to blame something else for the collapse of the Soviet Union...
 
At first, when I saw the name "Romanov", I thought this is an ASB timeline about a member of the royal house of Romanov actually joining the Communist Party.:D

That would be interesting. I’d imagine them joining secretly in university and then defecting in the early days of the revolution. The tsar’s family might survive, but the Tsar himself is utterly screwed.
 
Keith Jones - Historian, Author of 'The Return of Stalin: The Soviet Union under Romanov'

If the entire previous history of the Soviet Union wasn't enough to convince you of the morally repugnant practices of the communist party, Chernobyl should have. The Soviets only acknowledged the incident once they were forced to once detected in the free west. The Soviets then covered up the failure of their defective shoddy reactors and went about trying to retrofit them secretly. Thankfully this was exposed in 1987 by a CIA report widely commented on in the press. President Reagan rightfully lambasted the Soviets for their crimes, calling them an empire "built of lies, predicated on deceit and the depravity and tyranny only those evil men could imagine".
 
I also wanted to give everyone an opportunity to weigh in the progression of this timeline. Do you have suggestions? Do you like it? Do you disagree with the realisticness of what i'm trying to present as alternate history?

Ultimately this was never going to be a Soviet wank, it however seemed to me that it was generally destabilized by weak and incompetence governance. The only real aspect I changed was adding a younger, dynamic leader (we've seen many of those in history) who because of the appropriate conditions manages to change the general direction of society. Once we proceed from the cold war proper into our own timeline, I'll have more opportunities to display the negative effects created by this change in history.
 
I also wanted to give everyone an opportunity to weigh in the progression of this timeline. Do you have suggestions? Do you like it? Do you disagree with the realisticness of what i'm trying to present as alternate history?

This timeline is wonderful, my only suggestion is to flesh out the response to this USSR by the West even more. The changes to the proxy war in Nicaragua were an interesting touch, and seeing what happens to a US that has all its paranoias and prejudices affirmed is interesting, because that can have very nasty results and that'll add more flavor to the timeline.
 
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