How could the collapse of the Soviet Union have been prevented

Okay, the latter is flatly ridiculous, and is proven wrong by China, in regards to people like Deng.

As pointed out, Russia is not China. The political class had far too much invested in ideological orthodoxy to alter it in any significant way. The NEP was generally viewed as a one-time, emergency measure in response to the terrible conditions after the Civil War, and pretty much everything Lenin ever said/wrote about it backed that up. Even more so, the enshrined, official version of history demonized the program for having created the kulaks and generally leading to problems that only collectivization of the peasantry fixed.
 
As pointed out, Russia is not China. The political class had far too much invested in ideological orthodoxy to alter it in any significant way. The NEP was generally viewed as a one-time, emergency measure in response to the terrible conditions after the Civil War, and pretty much everything Lenin ever said/wrote about it backed that up. Even more so, the enshrined, official version of history demonized the program for having created the kulaks and generally leading to problems that only collectivization of the peasantry fixed.

Okay, I admit, I'm being a hypocrite here because I did a whole thread on the problems of Soviet liberalization.

With that in mind, I fully admit it is insanely difficult. But impossible? Or ASB? That's pushing it. China was hardly unorthodox in its political devotion to its version of Communism pre-Deng for one, to say the least.
 
Avoid WWII and the Cold War as we knew it. The losses suffered, followed by crushing victory and an atomic staring contest meant you had a national leadership defined by paranoia, military chauvinism and a belief anyone who hadn't served in the Great Patriotic War wasn't good enough for a top spot. Which led to the insane position of pensioners on dialysis commanding a superpower. The Cold War in of itself, as it took place doomed the Soviets. The US had all the advantages for 'peaceful' competition - even if you hand waved Washington into a mirror-image Stalinist state, its resources and geopolitical position would see it through to victory.

Brezhnev out of the picture alone could probably give the USSR another decade of life, his complete indifference to rot and corruption is frankly staggering. Replace him with a competent reformer and political operator like Kosygin and who knows the USSR might not even have import grain(!). Its not doing a Deng but Kosygin, and fellow Leningraders had a bent for technocratic improvements and providing financial incentives, basically Tito-lite. However limited scope and Brezhnev's paranoia over the man's position meant he was consistently held back and limited to a seat warmer in the Politburo by the 1970s.

Actually a good POD might be avoiding Andrei Zhdanov's death from alcoholism in 1948 (have him follow Stalin's advice to quit the bottle). He rose in Stalin's favour during the war and quickly became the dictator's favourite showering him with praise and genuine paternal affection. He managed to get Malenkov isolated and influence Stalin into breaking up Beria's intelligence empire in 1946. Who knows given a few years, Zhdanov might encourage him to rid the Soviet Union of Beria entirely, frankly given Stalin's low opinion of the man its impressive he never did.

His death allowed Beria and Malenkov to worm back into favour and by January 1949 they played on Stalin's paranoia, drawing parallels to Kirov and Trotsky with regards to Zhdanov's lieutenants in Leningrad who commanded a relatively autonomous control of the city. Que the Leningrad Affairs which saw men like Kuznetsov shot, Kosygin thrown into the political wilderness and over 2,000 low level officials thrown into the actual wilderness of Siberian exile.

So say Zhdanov lives, Beria and co. are thrown out (possibly shot) and he becomes official successor. Stalin dies around 1955, and his loyal bureaucracy falls in line behind Zhdanov. The Leningraders, like Kosygin come to power with him and set about reforming the system as did in the Hero City, which basically boils down to depoliticising the economy, adding varying financial incentives, a technocratic approach (so no planting corn in Siberia on a whim) and an increased focus on light industry. In such a USSR I imagine no Secret Speech, and more subtle changes with the added benefit of Zhdanov and co. being the Man of Steel's chosen successors. I can also see Stalin in time receiving similar treatment to Mao in China, still visible in national imagery but a 'flawed hero'. He remains entombed next to Lenin, and Zhdanov might join them in time, say circa 1960-65 if he remains teetotal.

Its still a Stalinist hell hole in many respects but you get fewer bread lines, more productivity and if you avoid the various coup attempts in favour of succession, the MGB/KGB might remain subservient to the Politburo. None of this avoids the vast resources driven into the military, nukes and the space programme but if Zhdanov is succeeded by Kosygin, there could be a lot more cash flowing around to sustain it.
 
This could work quite well actually, and moves the Soviet Union into something that could sustain for quite awhile, if not the most efficiently ever.
 
Its still a Stalinist hell hole in many respects but you get fewer bread lines, more productivity and if you avoid the various coup attempts in favour of succession, the MGB/KGB might remain subservient to the Politburo. None of this avoids the vast resources driven into the military, nukes and the space programme but if Zhdanov is succeeded by Kosygin, there could be a lot more cash flowing around to sustain it.

If Kosygin succeeds Zhdanov under such circumstances would it be possible for earlier political liberalization by the 70s?
 
If Kosygin succeeds Zhdanov under such circumstances would it be possible for earlier political liberalization by the 70s?

I doubt it. Gorbachev was a closet social democrat, Kosygin on the other hand is a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. Really the likes of Gorbachev only got to the top spot (and stayed there for a time) due the sheer awfulness of the octogenarians in the Politburo causing a backlash. A healthier political establishment means if Kosygin or someone else suggested glasnost, they would be quickly replaced. IOTL in the 1980s, the old guard tolerated it for a time simple because they had nowhere else to go.

Frankly if the Soviet Union can reform as I suggest and establish a modicum of prosperity more akin to Yugoslavia rather than China for example, probably just means the Party dictatorship lasts longer.
 
Stalin never becomes party chairman. His replacement is not even more scornful of science than Sarah Palin is. Communism is a dumb idea economically, but it wasn't not an evil idea as such until Stalin started doing his Hitler impersonation between the late 30s and early 50s.

With a red army that is not hamstrung by Stalin's trust that Hitler wouldn't invade, and hasn't been through the purges, Russia might have 10 million or so fewer casualties in WWII. That's an economic bonus right there. With none of that Lamarkian 'evolution is wrong' nonsense destroying the soviet food supply, even centralised planning should have been able to keep everyone feed.

A 'saner' post WWII might have simply picked up german car and aircraft factories and moved then a few hundred miles Eastwood, along with the workers, rather than simply grabvbing bits and pieces to incorporate into Russian factories. So 'skodas' get significantly more reliable. ^.^

With no secret police, no bread queues, and a steady improvement in living conditions due to a (somewhat) functional economy, Soviet populations might not have resented the 'fatherland' as much as they did.

OR

Just have a saner military budget. It's not like they ever really used that massive army of theirs, or all those missiles.

OR

Don't invade Afghanistan.

OR

Don't completely **** up the design of Chernobal.

OR

Some kind of major technological breakthrough. Fusion might be good.

The problem with the Soviet Union is that pre WWII things were bad, and then it simply went downhill from there, and only started to get better a couple of decades later. Find some of avoiding that, and improving the speed of improvement, and it might work well enough to stop open revolt.
 
How could the Soviet Union survive to the present day and into the foreseeable future, still as a superpower, under a Communist (at least in name) system?

Rules:

* There can be reforms, but not to the degree of the ones China carried out.

* The structure of the Soviet government stays the same.

* The Soviet government has to retain every single republic.

* The Soviet Union must still remain a superpower capable of militarily and geopolitically challenging the United States.

I'm probably one of the few AH members who believe this was even possible.

The best POD would've been the early 1960s, either during the Khrushchev or very early in the Brezhnev administration. I like to use 1 January 1961, the date of a major OTL Soviet currency reform, as a POD.

*Keep the "Ghoulash Communism" policy of increasing consumer goods production.

*Make the ruble freely convertible to other currencies.

*Keep the CPSU monopoly but allow multicandidate elections within the Party framework.

*Open the gates to both immigration and emigration.

*Increase civil liberties regarding non-economic matters, such as homosexuality.

*Send whatever signals are necessary to convince the capitalist world that the USSR has no aggressive intent, but will defend itself at any cost.

This probably means keeping Khrushchev in office and avoiding the stagnator Brezhnev.
 
What finished the soviets was the price of oil and gold dropped too low. They were no longer able to import enough food to feed them selves.

Without some kind of of market based economy the soviets could not survive.
Having to import food from their enemy meant the soviets were never real the to the Americans.

A large army was not much use to the soviets as they could not use it against the west when they were depend on imported food and with nuclear weapons any attack would have been point less.

Soviets need enough of a market economy to feed themselves and not just depend on exporting raw materials to buy the stuff they should have been able to produce them selves.

Markets and socialism aren't totally incompatible. A convertible currency would've made exporting products more likely. For those who say their quality was too low, were Soviet goods really any worse than the gunk (yes, I said gunk, it wasn't even good enough to be called junk IMHO), that came out of China in the 1990s?
 
One thing that would greatly help would be to not manipulate their stock market as much as they did

They passed idiotic measures such as forbidding the market to go down :rolleyes: so nobody trusted it or invested in it.

This greatly impacted their company's ability to raise capital from internal or external sources since everyone knew the market was fixed and couldn't be properly evaluated.
 
One thing that would greatly help would be to not manipulate their stock market as much as they did

They passed idiotic measures such as forbidding the market to go down :rolleyes: so nobody trusted it or invested in it.

This greatly impacted their company's ability to raise capital from internal or external sources since everyone knew the market was fixed and couldn't be properly evaluated.

What stock market?
 
Stalin supporting the NEP and the right could have borne some interesting fruit with regards to the economic capabilities of the Soviet Union. In the end a lot in the USSR's history comes down to Stalin, he was the most singularly-effective leader that the early Soviet Union had to offer that wouldn't have to make a potentially volatile ruling coalition with other members of the Party to prop up his rule. Changing Stalin offers a chance to drastically change the USSR, changing it early, and changing it dramatically, does a lot for Soviet history.

Of course the problem is how to get him to do it when doing it will make it look like Stalin is backing Bukharin for succession of Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union, it also hurts Stalin's support among the more traditional cadre of Bolsheviks who saw the NEP as a deviation.

What would have to happen is Stalin would have to support NEP in a way where he stole Bukharin's thunder and pretended that the NEP was somehow his darling all along. It's ultimately a political choice and may well go against Stalin's own ideological feelings on the matter.
 
The reason that China was able to reform was because their brand of Communism had clearly failed, everyone could see it, and it was safe to admit it. Moreover, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao had actually attacked the party itself. Thus it was possible for Deng to declare that Mao had been "two thirds right and one third wrong." Can you imagine any Soviet leader saying that Lenin had been even 10% wrong? Can you imagine any Soviet leader saying that Lenin had been wrong about anything? It's a bit like the scene in 1984 where Winston writes in his diary, "Freedom means having the freedom to say two and two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." The political class of the Soviet Union was simply too invested in ideological orthodoxy.

Add to all that, there was a much more practical reason for the centrality of Communist orthodoxy to the Soviet state. China had been a nation since ancient times, and traditionally been a much more cohesive nation-state than Russia. The USSR was the successor to the Russian Empire, which was basically a colonial empire much like the other European empires of the 20th century. The USSR was never a nation, no matter how hard it tried to be. There's an off chance they might have succeeded with enough time, but enough time in this case means several hundred years. To its last day, the Soviet Union remained too much of a disparate hodgepodge for it to have any meaningful sense of nationhood outside of Communist ideology. Ultimately, when Communist ideology is exposed to have failed - and it will fail eventually for the reasons that it did in OTL - the Soviet system and the state it sustains will collapse. The only remarkable thing about the collapse of the Soviet Union in OTL was that it happened as quickly and as relatively bloodlessly as it did.
 
The reason that China was able to reform was because their brand of Communism had clearly failed, everyone could see it, and it was safe to admit it. Moreover, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao had actually attacked the party itself. Thus it was possible for Deng to declare that Mao had been "two thirds right and one third wrong." Can you imagine any Soviet leader saying that Lenin had been even 10% wrong? Can you imagine any Soviet leader saying that Lenin had been wrong about anything? It's a bit like the scene in 1984 where Winston writes in his diary, "Freedom means having the freedom to say two and two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." The political class of the Soviet Union was simply too invested in ideological orthodoxy.

Add to all that, there was a much more practical reason for the centrality of Communist orthodoxy to the Soviet state. China had been a nation since ancient times, and traditionally been a much more cohesive nation-state than Russia. The USSR was the successor to the Russian Empire, which was basically a colonial empire much like the other European empires of the 20th century. The USSR was never a nation, no matter how hard it tried to be. There's an off chance they might have succeeded with enough time, but enough time in this case means several hundred years. To its last day, the Soviet Union remained too much of a disparate hodgepodge for it to have any meaningful sense of nationhood outside of Communist ideology. Ultimately, when Communist ideology is exposed to have failed - and it will fail eventually for the reasons that it did in OTL - the Soviet system and the state it sustains will collapse. The only remarkable thing about the collapse of the Soviet Union in OTL was that it happened as quickly and as relatively bloodlessly as it did.


I don't think we need a Soviet leader to have declared that Lenin was wrong. After all Lenin did institute the NEP which is similar to what China did after Mao. What is probably needed is a Soviet leader who would declare that Lenin was right in instituting the NEP after the devastation of the First World War and the Revolution and Civil War and that a second NEP was needed after the devastation of the Second World War. Lenin was of the opinion that the NEP should have lasted for decades (at least until universal literacy was accomplished). So what was needed was a leader who could probably have said that Stalin was wrong (we got that in Khrushchev) and that Lenin was right and that a Second NEP is needed after WWII and that it should last for decades as Lenin envisioned (to my knowledge, Khrushchev did not articulate this).

The problem there is that Stalin's communism hadn't failed as spectacularly as Mao's communism because Stalin had a World War II victory, super-power status and the Atomic Bomb as part of his legacy, whereas Mao had the Cultural Revolution. Stalin had no Cultural Revolution equivalent so saying Stalin was wrong would be hard to do as it wouldn't necessarily be obvious to the rest of the communist party that it was so.


Perhaps if Khrushchev had stressed more that Lenin was right and that Stalin "erred" in overlooking the need for an NEP and had been "excessive" with the purges of the 1930s-1950s while not directly attacking Stalin's character (and probably extolling him in other ways) then maybe this could have been a step in the right direction. It wouldn't be completely rejecting Stalin, while at the same time trying to get back to Lenin's NEP and making it the new policy (and enhancing it by applying its provisions not only to agriculture but to industry).

Earlier it was mentioned that perhaps if Zhdanov had survived that reformers like Kosygin might have had a longer term at the helm, but Zhdanov's cultural doctrine was pretty bad for the USSR and wasn't it one of the foundations for the Cultural Revolution in China?
 
I think the best POD after WWII to save the Soviet Union was to have Lauretiv Beria survives the vacuum after the death of Joseph Stalin instead of having been killed by his enemies.

With Beria's survival, I think he was willing to Finlandize the entire Eastern Europe and perhaps Germany in exchange of Western foreign investments to modernize the Soviet's economy and able to have a smooth transition to market economy that by 2010, Soviet Union would be the largest economy in the world with standard of living similar to Spain or Greece.
 
I think the best POD after WWII to save the Soviet Union was to have Lauretiv Beria survives the vacuum after the death of Joseph Stalin instead of having been killed by his enemies.

With Beria's survival, I think he was willing to Finlandize the entire Eastern Europe and perhaps Germany in exchange of Western foreign investments to modernize the Soviet's economy and able to have a smooth transition to market economy that by 2010, Soviet Union would be the largest economy in the world with standard of living similar to Spain or Greece.

Hmmm....2010 Greece isn't necessarily a good model...
 

The Sandman

Banned
Either Gary Powers doesn't make his flight (presumably because Eisenhower gets wind of it and tells the CIA to not do something that risks scuttling the Paris Summit scheduled for just two weeks later) or he doesn't get shot down. Therefore, the Paris Summit doesn't collapse, and Khrushchev isn't forced to take a harder line with respect to the US, thus probably butterflying away both the Cuban Missile Crisis and his unseating in favor of Brezhnev. This lets you start the USSR down the road towards increased liberalization and (far more importantly) switching some of its spending from the military to the civilian economy in the 1960s.
 
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