DBWI: What if the USSR had collapsed in the 90s?

As much as we can't believe it nowadays, the Soviet Union was having severe troubles in the early 90s. What would a world with only one superpower be? Would it be more peaceful then the seemingly never-ending Cold War?
 
As much as we can't believe it nowadays, the Soviet Union was having severe troubles in the early 90s. What would a world with only one superpower be?
I'd give good odds on the world being in ruins. If the USSR had come apart, it certainly would not have fallen peacefully. Factions fighting each other (take the mess that was Yugoslavia, you know the one that got so bad that both superpowers had to join together to clean it up? and have that happen in Soviet Russia...), and the Soviet nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of god knows who... Call it a safe bet that a collapsing USSR, hell even just a collapsing Warsaw Pact (which did almost come to pass in the late '80s), would have pulled Western civilization down with it. We'd have got an all out nuclear war made even worse by it being completely unexpected. The closest thing to a superpower would likely be Brazil, on the count that they're out of range of Soviet missiles and not on the American target list by virtue of being an American ally. Everyone else is either too weak or would be smashed. With some of the latter being hit by both sides.
Would it be more peaceful then the seemingly never-ending Cold War?
Would a post-nuclear hell where the lid has been removed from every border dispute and ethnic grudge ever be more peaceful than an enforced bipolar international order that is only disrupted by the occasional proxy war? In spite of, (and likely because of), the balance of terror that has prevailed for the last seventy years, the world is more peaceful now than it has been since the dawn of civilization. It is not ideal, but then again, anything that involves people will never be 'ideal'.

Now would anyone really want a world where there is only one superpower, and no one has the strength to stop it whenever it throws it's weight around? Even if that superpower is the United States? It might make for an interesting AH story, but probably not one that has a happy ending.
 
That brief window roughly 91-93 saw the liberation of four countries five after Czechoslovakia split, East Germany, Hungry, Czechoslovakia, and of course poland, its not any wonder why their all Nato countries now, the soviet union was and still is an opressive place, and its only gotten worse since the hardliners got into power. So on balance? The world and expecially the people still trapped in that nightmare world would be better off.
 
Really? It's had a number of problems for a while now, and protests have rocked it since the mid 90's
They haven't set the army on a protest since '91 when they sent the tanks into Red Square. the ones that make the news these days are noisy, peaceful and most of all short. And so long as they stay that way, the KGB is fine with letting the public vent. The USSR, first of the communist nations is now communist in name only. Sure they're still a police state, but since Gorbachev got his reforms through, they've been a richer one where the public doesn't give a damn about things like democracy and freedom so long as they have money in the bank, a car in the garage and food on the table. The lean years of the '80s are not forgotten but are clearly in the past. It's not a place that I'd want to live in, but it could be worse.
Not really. It would be pretty boring. Maybe a nice boring vignette, but a full-fledged TL? Hell naw.
Depends on how dystopian you want it to be. Or what point of view you use. It could work, especially if you can keep it from being a generic post-apocalyptic wasteland.
 
Would certainly have interesting effects on China.

Without the Kremlin as a sugar daddy, Peking would probably fall into chaos, eventually being reincorporated by Nanjing. Hell, if the Soviet Union falls into chaos, the Nationalists could even go for Siberia.
 
I remember an AH that speculated about how the collapse of USSR would have altered US politics by stripping suburban voters away from the GOP (the theory being they voted GOP for defense but favored Democrats on domestic issues)
 
I wonder what would've happened to the Soviet space program under this scenario, and especially the skilled staff? Would they possibly have been poached by other countries with spacefaring ambitions?

Mir 2 and Buran really gave NASA food for thought too - would they have ever launched Space Station Freedom without Mir 2 to compete against?
 

Insider

Banned
I remember an AH that speculated about how the collapse of USSR would have altered US politics by stripping suburban voters away from the GOP (the theory being they voted GOP for defense but favored Democrats on domestic issues)
cool. What's GOP?

(OOC: if thats something that doesn't exist in OTL just say)

Wonder how EU would fare without having to deal with (pseudo)communist bogeymen?

In OTL the rioting in USSR and mare threat of second civil war there, was the catalist for creation of Euroforce. At the beginnig USA was like "yay! Europe is finaly taking care of its own defense!". Almost two decades later they seem less giddy about it, as it seems, that it slowly subverts NATO. Unanimous decision to stay out of second Iraqi war, and intervention in Northwestern Africa agains US wishes, makes the status of the pact in question.

In TL proposed by OP it maybe never the need to create such force and EU would stay free trade union, possibly growing into development fund and tackling envronmental issues, but never into political or military matters. It maybe that such EU would most likely include UK, as they were against such deep integration and chose to drew their lots with USA
 
Well, Eurocommunism would certainly have been fair less successful. It's hard to imagine the "Gorbachevista" French and Italian Communists becoming so mainstream in the late 90's if the Soviet Union had blown up. We certainly wouldn't have seen Jeremy Corbyn welcoming the Communist Party of Great Britain as a affiliate organisation of the Labour Party last mouth, despite criticism for welcoming such a key part of the Brexit campaign into a party that nominally campaigned for Remain. It would be interesting to see how the European Union would develop with a weaker Communist left, maybe the far-right would be able to carry the Eurosceptic banner alone, but I found that doubtful. The whole "the left agrees with us" always gave the likes of Farage and Le Pen a sense of legitimacy in public discourse.

Hell, Portugal and Spain might have become capitalist countries after the fall of Fascism. Hard to imagine given how often the Portuguese National Salvation Junta fills headlines with their zany posturing and crackpot supervillan antics.
 
Last edited:
They haven't set the army on a protest since '91 when they sent the tanks into Red Square. the ones that make the news these days are noisy, peaceful and most of all short. And so long as they stay that way, the KGB is fine with letting the public vent. The USSR, first of the communist nations is now communist in name only. Sure they're still a police state, but since Gorbachev got his reforms through, they've been a richer one where the public doesn't give a damn about things like democracy and freedom so long as they have money in the bank, a car in the garage and food on the table. The lean years of the '80s are not forgotten but are clearly in the past. It's not a place that I'd want to live in, but it could be worse.

Up here around the coasts of the northern Baltic Sea we hear differently. After the independence movements in the Baltic SSRs were put down in the early 90s, it has been quite uncomfortable for the ethnic Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. Their living standards are still much lower than in the nearby Nordic area, and their personal freedoms are almost nonexistent. In the Baltic areas, the crackdown was a lot more brutal than in the Russian SFSR, I understand, and the authorities are still stricter. I am not supposed to talk about this, but according to a Finnish Border Guard officer I kind of know through relatives, on the southern coast they get Estonian defectors (especially military service dodgers) pretty much on a monthly basis, sometimes even the odd Latvian. They usually spirit them unofficially towards Sweden, even if officially they would have to arrest and report them and deport back to the good ol' USSR. Since the Toompea Massacre in 1992, there has been a lot of public sympathy for the Estonians among the Finnish people, even if President Tuomioja and PM Kääriäinen naturally can't take a public stand against internal Soviet policies, due to "Finno-Soviet friendship" and all that jazz.
 
Hell, Portugal and Spain might have become capitalist countries after the fall of Fascism. Hard to imagine given how often the Portuguese National Salvation Junta fills headlines with their zany posturing and crackpot supervillan antics.

OOC: The nationalist regimes in Portugal and Spain ended in 1974 and 1975 respectively, while the PoD for this TL is in the early 90s. I can't really see why or how they would want to leave the EU and the EEC after having joined only a few years earlier.
 
Top