No border between Soviet China and Russia

[Darkest]

I'm interested as to what would happen if the USSR retained a good relationship with the PRC. In fact, what if they built an even stronger relationship, to the point of trusting each other's populations? What if a new Premier of the USSR decided that it would be un-Communist if there were borders between the two? Chinese workers could seek better opportunities in Moscow or Leningrad, or Russian workers in Shanghai or Chongqing. Would population diffusion work to unify the two countries even further, and maybe even create a new ethno-cultural identity?

 

[mobius]

I'm sure the russians would not enjoy being swamped by chinese migrants

 

[jamestm]

1950?

Agreed they are both now hardly communist - sort capitalist commies if that. Russia seems more Czarist now and China so pro West it all seems unlikely from a worker communist point of view. It may have happened in 1950 if USSR had been cleverer in its world revolution to push socialism.

 

[ninebucks]

Communist economies do not give their workers the choice to go work abroad. This 'open-border' policy would in reality probably be a worker-exchange program, where a centralised labour office scrolls through a manifest of the most loyal workers and decides, "Da/Xie, Citizen #4500321, you shall go on the exchange to Beijing/Moscow."

 

[Darkest]

Well, I'm obviously not saying that they open their borders TODAY. I said Soviet China and Russia, if both of their countries were dominated by the Soviets. And, we can assume a program where a Premier or Supreme Soviet rules that population needs to be diffused equally, and maybe that a new cultural identity needed to be created.

 

[Fabilius]

Communist economies do not give their workers the choice to go work abroad. This 'open-border' policy would in reality probably be a worker-exchange program, where a centralised labour office scrolls through a manifest of the most loyal workers and decides, "Da/Xie, Citizen #4500321, you shall go on the exchange to Beijing/Moscow."

It´d would be an interesting POD. WI the soviets start an extensive worker exchange program to enhance solidarity between soviet nations?

 

[ninebucks]

It´d would be an interesting POD. WI the soviets start an extensive worker exchange program to enhance solidarity between soviet nations?

I wouldn't be surprised if such a program already existed amongst the Warsaw Pact nations, where the language gap was not so wide. But a Sino-Russian exchange would be quite difficult on linguistic and cultural levels to say the least.

Perhaps if the Iron Curtain had fallen a few hundred miles to the east, the USSR would have concentrated that extra bit more on their relations with China.

 

[MerryPrankster]

I think you'd need more idealistic Communists in charge of both for this to work.

Stalin and his successors were more old-school imperialists with ideology on top than genuine internationalists (the "We Know Now" book by Gaddis suggests Stalin wanted World Communism eventually, but believed Russian imperialism was the way to go, not a genuine multinational effort).

 

[Max Sinister]

I'm sure such programs existed (there were Vietnamese and Africans from Angola/Mozambique in East Germany), but I don't know on which level this happened.