Gorbachev botched Soviet reform - but how?

You're describing the NEP. It did not work.

He is talking here of an ATL. NEP did not work for political reasons, not commercial.

Except for Xinjiang and Tibet, in the USSR the only places with popular desire to split before the August coup at least were Georgia, Moldova and the Baltics Republics, the two are actually pretty analogous there as percentage of population. China's separatist supporters would actually compose a larger share of the country's total territory.

Well, it is a problem that grew in the USSR.

It also depends on how you define split. It could as I stated be argued for example that Georgia never split and it could be argued that it did split. Certainly, it was a significant problem in the old USSR nationality, but this is something in China that is only a minor issue.
 
I'm not saying it had to look exactly like China, but would you agree there is a path forward towards market reform?

Yes, and this path was dissolution of the SU and the system of satellite states (many of which had been heavily subsidized by the SU), getting rid of the Party rule and other steps that resulted in creation of today's Russia.

Actually let's propose a few alternatives:

Yeltsin after signing Belavezha, announced OTL that the USSR would be succeeded by the CIS, at the time a lot of people thought the CIS would look like a New Union Treaty style USSR, with a common armed forces and other institution retained for all member states. This fell apart largely because Yeltsin didn't actually care about it, If Yeltsin went for it do you think reform was possible under the CIS.

Yeltsin otl also considered grabbing the Presidency of the USSR after the August coup, if he went for it do you think the USSR could have being reformed and distangled from the Communist party.

The SU was a rotting corps and could not be easily sustained economically or politically.

The Baltic republics and at least Georgia wanted out. AFAIK, Ukraine also wanted independence (nationalism + expectation that on their own they'll better off economically). The trick with the common armed forces would not work either: quite obviously, the bulk of these forces would be Russian and so would be supreme command. Economic cooperation of the independent states is a totally different thing.

OTOH, with the existing Russian perspective that within the SU Russian Federation had been heavily subsidizing the republics, an idea of keeping the whole monstrosity intact did not get enough traction in the situation when economic conditions were visibly deteriorating: why feed others when you have shortages of everything? Just out of the prestige considerations?

As for Yeltsin, he was a great man of the spectacular actions but not a long-term leader of the country in trouble.
 
OTOH, with the existing Russian perspective that within the SU Russian Federation had been heavily subsidizing the republics, an idea of keeping the whole monstrosity intact did not get enough traction in the situation when economic conditions were visibly deteriorating: why feed others when you have shortages of everything? Just out of the prestige considerations?.

This is something that we see in democratic states, the desire to shed areas under its control that are dragging it down economically. As such they are only too happy to allow locals to take charge of these areas.

The other issue too is that they do not want to let others belief systems take charge eg now in the USSR case, if something like that survived in a democracy society, they would have a Muslim problem.
 
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No. Just no. The peasants pricing of thei exertion in terms of the paucity of light industrial production was precisely commercial. It is almost as if the scissors crisis didn't happen


I am not sure exactly what you mean here but I do remember reading that by closing NEP, the communist were able to double the collection of grain. This increase came as a terrible cost to the farmers.
 
Gorbachev's problems were twofold. First, he bought into his regime's own propaganda, and believed the oppressed masses of the USSR would too. Second, the Soviet system was rotting from within, and Washington upping the ante on military expansion and radical defenses made it much harder for the Soviets to continue at their pace of development and still keep up with Washington and the liberalizing West economically.
 
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