It might if the various member countries become semiautonomous or fully autonomous as part of Gorbachev's Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics.
How would you envision a 21st century USSR?
- Thread starter Malone
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I once read a surviving USSR timeline by Justinian which has Grigory Romanov succeeding Andropov as the POD. He describes it as 'giving the USSR a Putin or Xi'.
Deleted member 90949
This is pretty much what happened to Kazakhstan. Russification might be a sensible goal for a surviving USSR.
The USSR had internal passports. I could see this be used by republics in a reformed USSR to preserve demography.
chankljp
Donor
Sure. The same way that in OTL, the North Koreans are able to get their hands on Western produced computers via China. Most famously, with Kim Jong Il owning a MacBook Pro as his personal laptop.
To do so, however, just like with any external trade, they will need access to hard currency. And if we are talking about introducing computers on a massive scale needed for an automated economy to be possible, we will be taking about a lot of hard currency being required.
No, we are talking about a small network, at most, to manipulate statistics. It probably could be handled by one computer.
Best case scenario China (maybe less human rights abuses if Gorbachev's faction remain in power)
Worst case scenario North Korea except huge with tons of resources and a large nuclear arsenal
Worst case scenario North Korea except huge with tons of resources and a large nuclear arsenal
Computers can't make random numbers at all. So Cuba having or not having modern computers doesn't really make a whole lot of odds at the end of the day. Though I grant that we may not yet have enough data out of Cuba to spot the difference between real noise and the pseudorandom output of a computer program.
Even if we assume that it is possible for Cuba to fabricate convincing data if they want to, and that when looking at that data a forensic analyst would be fooled, I am doubtful that would be enough.
For a start, Cubans will be subject to the usual quotient of incompetence as the rest of humanity, so I suspect that by now enough data leaks and people being lazy or hitting the wrong button on the spreadsheet would have happened that any attempt to falsify data on this scale would be apparent. Add to that, the Cubans are under observation by a stunning array of US hardware and people (sometimes quite high-ranking people) keep fleeing the country and airing the regime's dirty laundry.
The Lizard Overlords these guys ain't.
fasquardon
Deleted member 90949
Guys, this thread isn't about Cuba. We're here to discuss a much bigger country halfway around the world from it.
What might the internet look like under a surviving USSR?
What effect might losing the Warsaw pact and the Baltic states have on the USSR short term? What relationship will they have with their former clients?
What might the internet look like under a surviving USSR?
What effect might losing the Warsaw pact and the Baltic states have on the USSR short term? What relationship will they have with their former clients?
That's not exactly true. To be more precise, without special random number generation equipment, computers are restricted to pseudorandom numbers. But it's quite possible to get special random number generation equipment (based on atmospheric noise or radioactive decays or the like), and pseudorandomness is not necessarily very easily distinguishable from randomness (indeed, some pseudorandom number generators are good enough to be used for cryptographic purposes, which demands extremely high quality random numbers).
In any case, fabricating statistics with computers in such a way that they are indistinguishable from real data is actually quite difficult and doesn't seem to happen in the real world. It's much easier to simply apply methods that frame the data in a way that makes you look good, as you previously mentioned, or to apply a small bias to real data (a large bias would be easier to detect). Severely faking the type of data being discussed also creates other problems around ensuring that you keep track of the correct data for yourself...
I think a Soviet-originated counterpart to the Internet looks similar to what it would in 1985 - limited to professional or economic use with perhaps University or educational bulletin boards being the extent of social media. News would still be regulated and Soviet citizens might have dedicated viewing tablets with either little freedom to create their own content or encouragement to do so in youth as a means of evaluating future developers and government agents. A surviving USSR using Western Internet would likely be molded by whatever changes allowed them to survive but one part North Korea (criminal activity), one part Ukraine (freelance web development while keeping code for 'inspiration' later on), two parts China (lots of e-commerce directly from the source, some snooping), and two parts India (coding sweatshops/hive programmers helping bring in capital for the State to trade with regarding other necessities).
Russia loses a ready market for its sub-par goods and has to make up the difference by exporting more raw materials, improving the quality of its manufactured goods, opening new markets, improving its internal system to be more efficient and cut waste, or ideally a combination of the above. Everyone will be leery of the Russian bear, especially Poland and the Baltic States, and even more especially if ghey start to strengthen, but ultimately Europe likes its Russian natural gas and profitable trade has its way of reducing tensions. But *any* Russian interference will be disproportionately reported and even less tolerated, Moscow may even bear accusations when it literally has not done anything.
This VERY much depends on how the USSR has survived and how the WARPAC and Baltic states were lost.
And are you asking about only a USSR survival where it remains a union of socialist republics, or is becoming the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics under Gorbachev's New Union treaty also a "USSR survival" in your view?
Personally, I don't think that the USSR under the Communist Party can survive the credibility hit of losing all of their European allies and some of their own republics. So many rushing for the exit would just be too much of an indictment of the Party for me to believe that the population of the USSR would continue supporting them. So IMO the short term effect of losing the WARPAC and Baltics is to destroy the USSR. How messy the destruction is depends on other factors.
If Gorbachev somehow succeeds, and we are talking about the short term impact on the multi-party Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, things are likely to be complex.
The Communist Party has good odds to remain the largest party in the - let's call it Sovereign Union for brevity, loss of the corrupt and opportunistic to nationalist parties will result in a big turnover of personnel, meaning a strong brand (since for 70-ish years it has been the ONLY brand allowed) is freed of the failures of yesterday. But equally, the Communists could end up being sidelined by the rising oligarch class for the same reasons as OTL, just its sidelining takes a little more time and effort.
If the Communists survive and thrive in the Sovereign Union however, then the credibility of the Communists of the Baltics and former WARPAC are also boosted. Especially so if the Communists re-take power in the Sovereign Union and do a good job (likely they could do a better job than Yeltsin, but that's mostly because Yeltsin was heroically awful). So we could see a tension between wanting to retain freedom from Russian domination and a stronger E. European left seeing the Russian-led Union as an imperfect but vital ally/beacon of hope. Possibly this could mean a slower expansion of NATO and the EU with some former WARPAC states returning to an alliance with the Sovereign Union and some aligning with W. Europe, or we could see things go much as OTL, only a stronger Communist remnant leaves less space in politics for ultra-nationalists to rise since avoiding complete humiliation not only means that the Communists could compete better for the nostalgic voters, the threat of them regaining power might also boost the liberal parties of E. Europe.
Politics in Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse were incredibly fast moving and complex however, and the ripples haven't stopped spreading. Any alternate process will be at least as complex I think, so I doubt by short conjecture above can really do justice to what would happen in such an ATL.
I suspect it would look much like the internet of places like China. But again, this very much depends on how the USSR has survived.
If the USSR is such a zombie that it can't even continue rolling out telephone service to the last without connections, I can imagine the internet might look more like a series of inter-connected BBS services in major cities, with limited infrastructure keeping things in an eternal early-90s from a US or W. European perspective. I can imagine such a moribund communications infrastructure would eventually be replaced by the onslaught of mobile telephones though. Even if Soviet citizens are importing black market phones and repeater station hardware, the gains of being entrepreneurial in this area would be enormous.
I was classifying that under "specialist equipment" rather than under "computer" in my brain. Different categorizations of equipment aside, I agree with everything you've said here. Good point about pseudorandom numbers being good enough for cryptography - I hadn't considered that.
fasquardon
A "super-liberal USSR" is an old and tired AH cliché. Those that had to actually live under the system knew full well it is utterly corrupt and unreformable, and was since its inception. The USSR was also a continuation of the tsarist era Russian nationalist/supremacist imperialism, just under an ideological rebranding, to appear more mystical and appealing. (Something all totalitarian regimes love doing, especially towards those people willing to take their propaganda word utterly at face value.)
These are three older, definitive AH.com discussions on why a "reformed, super-liberal, suddenly super-democratic and economic powerhouse USSR" is an utter fantasy that completely ignores cold, hard facts about one of the worst totalitarian polities ever created:
PP: Soviet Liberalization
Okay, I term this a plausibility problem, because I see it as a constant theme brought up in timelines, however its difficulties aren't adequately addressed. Now, this thread is one that I would actually like to be disproven by those with good knowledge of this particular subject, however lets...
www.alternatehistory.com
WI: USSR artificially improves its living conditions to become a "USA of the East"
It was a widely known fact even during the Cold War, that the East Block satellite states of the Soviet Union, especially East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were better off than the USSR itself. While most Western Europeans, especially in the 50s and 60s were jealous of not being...
www.alternatehistory.com
Soviet Internet and other thoughts.
I was listening to this audiobook today (Revolution 1989), and started thinking about what the internet would look like in the Soviet Union. I'm not caring about how it survived, but what if it did survive until today? How would modern technology impact the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact...
www.alternatehistory.com
Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s had a better basic living standard than the USSR, but even with that in mind, the regime was lagging behind neighbouring Austria, all other West Block countries, and even the relatively more liberal Poland and Hungary, and Czechoslovak citizens were clamouring for more freedom. If Czechoslovakia was living the high life, then people wouldn't have been emigrating and running away in 1948, 1968, throughout the 80s and the entire 1948-1989 era, and wouldn't have literally assaulted the barbed wire fences in autumn 1989 with wirecutters and did literal marches on Vienna. You don't see many people, AH enthusiasts included, clamouring for the continued survival of communist Czechoslovakia well into the 21st century.
Back in the 1940s and 50s, Moscow commies and their newly coup-installed vassals in Prague loved to toss around blasphemous and cocksure phrases "We command the rain and wind ! We commnad nature itself !". Utterly delusional and devoid of any humility, common sense and logic.
The fact that the Aral Sea is no more is largelly due to this attitude. Not to mention all the insane pollution left over in the former East Block.
But wait, it gets better ! In that "we defy nature" cocksure attitude that would make Ar-Pharazon blush, they decided to play carelessly with "magical rocks" that provided energy. They genuinely thought that shoddy workmanship, nepotism and shoddy workplace standards would not create a disaster one day. Then April 1986 happened and the Soviets' "we are gods, we tamper in the domain of nature without humility, fore-thought or responsibility" attitude struck them back.
So much so that I think it was one of the single biggest dents in Great Big Fib that was the USSR. The same Great Big Fib that all totalitarians (right-wing and left-wing alike) tell people, to keep them in line, and love telling each other, to believe their own anti-democratic lies. But once that fib is fully exposed, what trust there was collapses fast. Given that it took only three to five years for the collapse of the huge and feared regime is testament to just how much they screwed up and how little they cared for the lives, health and infomedness of ordinary people. Not one tiny bit.
The USSR was a fantastic place to be if you were part of the ruling, narrow, and utterly unaccountable political elite, or any of their brown-nosing careerist lackeys. It was a near-feudal setup, where everyone brown-nosed to their local higher-up, in a desperate effort to lead a slightly richer and slightly less crappy life, unachievable through honest and transparent means. Cronyist feudalism dressed up in propaganda as utopian socialism is not something I associate with liberalism, liberalising, democracy, transparency or long-term economic power. (The USSR was infamous for often plagiarising western consumer goods, not unlike the PRC.)
Signed,
an actual person from the former East Block
And to rule break, to "stick it to the government". The repercussions of which we are still seeing in the former East Block, to this day.
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