Andropov and the survival of the Soviet Union

Cook

Banned
Inevitable is a silly word to bandy around here.

And a dangerous word for politicians to use anytime.
 
By the time that the protests in the warpac states were really getting started wasn't the Soviet system pretty much running on oil and loans? At that point sustaining superpowerdom was pretty much impossible.

If the Collapse of the Soviet Union was so inevitable, how is it that the People’s Republic of China isn’t in the dust bin of history too?


the economic structures of the post-Stalin USSR and the post-Deng PRC very little in common with each other. The only real similarities are an authoritarian government and pretending that their going to introduce a communist utopia at some point in the future.





 

Cook

Banned
Manea’s question was how you make the Soviet Union survive.

We don’t need a list of why it couldn’t; we need options so that it could.

“Solutions dammit, I want solutions!”
 
for the USSR to survive, some idea's
sticking to post-WW2, so there's a defined sense of the the identity of the USSR is.

no Brezhnev stagnation is a must, so no Cuban missle crisis? or at least making what the soviets got out of it public?
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
You could have Malenkov stay on as premier and never have Khrushchev succeed to the post. Malenkov favored a much more gradual shift from focus on heavy industry to of consumer products, basically maintaining a sustainable balance between the two industries. He was also wary of the Virgin Lands Campaign, which turned out to be a major bungle on Khrushchev's part.

IOTL, this failed because of Khrushchev's rather ham-fisted and ultimately short-lived attempts at reform and Brezhnev's reactive hyper-Stalinist economic policy.
 
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I think that the idea of having Malenkov take over instead of Khrushchev is the best bet. Khrushchev's policies were schizophrenic and short-lived. His various schemes were rarely followed through and he would often change tack half way through the issue (consider his relations with Eisenhower. One minute he's calling for peaceful co-existance, the next he's saying' we will bury you' to the Americans.)
If Malenkov can at least monitor these swings and keep the USSR moving gradually from a heavy industrial command economy to one more focused on consumer goods, it may have some more life. However, fundamentally what the USSR needs to do is ditch its Eastern European empir ASAP. If they can do so in the early 1950s they can call it an end t ooccupation and say they've helped the countries transfer to stable states. The occupation of the states cost vast sums of money and their restlessness was always troublesome.
Get rid of Eastern Europe, therefore, just don't let them join NATO, and move from heavy industry to consumer goods gradually through the 1960s.
 
I don't have a link at the moment, but I seem to recall that the economy became a direct cause of the USSR's failure.

The Soviet Union needed currency earned from oil exports to buy grain, keep the military-industrial complex running and prop up their satellite states. The oil glut in the '80s (thank you Saudi Arabia) reduced this money flow and they had to start taking loans from the west. It came down to the west (I forget which government/officialdom) telling them that no more loans would be floated if they cracked down on liberalizing east-European states (circa '88-'89).

Put some cracks in the US-Saudi relationship and the Soviets will have more currency to play with. They might have manuvering room for reform.....
 
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