No reforms: how long does the USSR last after 1985?

No reforms: how long does the USSR last after 1985?

  • 1991

    Votes: 11 15.7%
  • 1996

    Votes: 24 34.3%
  • 2000

    Votes: 8 11.4%
  • 2004

    Votes: 2 2.9%
  • Today

    Votes: 25 35.7%

  • Total voters
    70
The economy was worse and people were less well-off in the 30s and 50s than the 80s. As bad as things were 1970s=80s USSR still had more stuff and better food than before.
Maybe if you look at it from an absolute perspective, but from that perspective, every single country in a world lives better-off than it used to, so political dissent, revolutions and insurgencies should be impossible to exist anywhere, right?

Communist states are good at suppressing dissent. They have 70 years to make people scared of kgb either arresting them or making sure their kids will never ever get good job or accepted in college if they protest too much.
This is indeed true, and they could have gone further to become full North Korea, but being a hardline totalitarian is awful on the world stage, especially for a country which has been importing food from the West since the 60s and is already on the verge of bankruptcy. Soviet leaders knew that.

Then why is North Korean leader Kim Jun on partying with Dennis Rodman despite having economy which 100x worse than 1985 ussr
Well, for one, we have no idea what is happening in North Korea itself right now. The NK nomenklatura could be panicking and drawing up plans for China-style reforms as we speak, or they could already be splintering up and preparing for a civil war, so before we know what the actual political situation in there is, we cannot draw any assumptions.
 

dcharleos

Donor
Authoritarian regimes are the most in danger when they attempt reforms instead of just carrying out the status quo, sure the people are mad about the economy or repression but regimes usually have tools to make sure they don't become too upset. Or at very least that they are too scared of having them and their family shot to voice their discontent too openly.

OTL Gorbachev destroyed the foundations holding the USSR together, inadvertently I might add, through his reforms. What if we had a series of conservative (Gishin, Grigory Romanov?) general secretaries who tries to keep up the status quo for as long as possible. How long does the USSR last?


It seems clear to me that there's no intrinsic reason the USSR couldn't last until the present day had Gorbachev not taken the course he took.[1] The survival of Cuba, North Korea, China, Vietnam--all ostensibly Communist regimes that did not politically liberalize--should be evidence enough of that.

[1] And there are a number of courses open to them. They could have opted for Brezhnev style autocracy, Chinese style state capitalism, Khrushchev style liberalization, Re-Stalinization, or something else completely.

[2] IN reality, China is a state capitalist/corporatist regime, while North Korea and Cuba are de facto monarchies.
 
the soviet people wasn't starving in 1985-1991 though, there were bread lines but everyone got fed. The starvation happened -after- the soviet collapse plenty of dictatorships keeps on going despite having shitty economies a common misconception is that dictatorships collapse when the economy goes badly. In reality dictatorships collapse when the regime tries to liberalize.

They tend to liberalize when they no longer have a choice. By the time Gorbachev came around the USSR was on its last legs. It was spending more and more money to achieve less and less. Its tech base was basically WWII and changed very little from that. Because of this it hit the law of diminishing returns while the West did not.
 
The problem is that I'm not sure if reforms like those are actually helpful

I mean Russia only hit soviet 1989 gdp per capita around 2008 (!!!) so it's not like those reforms gone well for Russia, giving control to a bunch of bureaucrats isn't actually helpful because all you are doing is privatizing the profits while giving them the same capabilities to distort the economy as when they were government employees. Only now they are doing it more openly for private gains.

In RL reforms tend to be a bitch even when needed. In fact even more when you really need it as you are on the edge by definition. Big changes tend to take lot of time and people make lots of mistakes before things are changed. It should have been more or less expected to take a generation or so. It took a long time for the US to totally recover from its revolution though the changes were smaller and the country was in better shape than 1980s USSR.
 
I think people are not considering the benefits that widespread computer technologies would have for a centrally planned system like Russia's. Near instantaneous information transfer combined with better record keeping would have revitalized the bureaucracy.

How is the USSR supposed to pay off the army when the increasing military budget is bankrupting the country?

They would probably decrease social spending
 
I think people are not considering the benefits that widespread computer technologies would have for a centrally planned system like Russia's. Near instantaneous information transfer combined with better record keeping would have revitalized the bureaucracy.

Only if record keeping were the problem. If the problem was instead a combination of inaccurate inputs (as managers lie to claim they met their targets), endemic theft (in order to barter on the black market for things you really need), a lack of incentives to improve performance, or even meet the spirit of the quotas (e.g. meeting shoe quotas by only making left shoes; appearing to meet maize quotas by planting a few rows along the roadside, then having more useful wheat behind them), and a hundred-and-one other inefficiencies and absurdities of the Soviet economy, having a computer keeping track of things is no help at all. Rubbish in, rubbish out.
 
Only if record keeping were the problem. If the problem was instead a combination of inaccurate inputs (as managers lie to claim they met their targets), endemic theft (in order to barter on the black market for things you really need), a lack of incentives to improve performance, or even meet the spirit of the quotas (e.g. meeting shoe quotas by only making left shoes; appearing to meet maize quotas by planting a few rows along the roadside, then having more useful wheat behind them), and a hundred-and-one other inefficiencies and absurdities of the Soviet economy, having a computer keeping track of things is no help at all. Rubbish in, rubbish out.

Overall I think there obviously would be a few ways in which computers would help eliminate some of these practices, such as inventory lists and generally a lot of adminstrative tools. I'm not suggesting that the Soviet economy would be suddenly turned efficient by the use of them, but there would obviously be some benefits. At the minimal they would improve industrial efficiency, it would be hard to get away with producing only left shoes when everything is logged with the managers name. You cannot take for granted the massive strides computerization has made possible in everything from weapons to industrial tools to vehicles and nearly everything under the sun. The Soviets were making strides in computer technology prior to the fall of the USSR, assisted with their robust engineering background.

But I'm also assuming that the USSR would start to veer more towards totalitarianism considering Grigory Romanov's position which may eliminate some of these inefficiencies too.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Maybe if you look at it from an absolute perspective, but from that perspective, every single country in a world lives better-off than it used to, so political dissent, revolutions and insurgencies should be impossible to exist anywhere, right?
Or it points to that the role economics play in revolution is misunderstood. Do economic crisis serve as catalysts for revolutions? Certainly. But it usually takes some bad political decisions on the part of the ancien regime for said regime to fall, and a very common mistake regimes make is trying to reform and lose control of the reform process. And this has being a thing since 1789.

Also, as much as we have the image of the hungry masses yearning for freedom overthrowing a tyrannical regime, it's rarely the angry mob that's the primary problem. Authoritarian regimes are more or less founded on stopping angry mobs from changing the system.

Regimes are in danger when the establishment revolts, which is what happened in 1991 when you had both the conservatives and the liberals revolt against Gorbachev's center: and because Gorbachev himself turned on his own power base in the Communist party. The Soviet Union could have stood a revolt by hungry and angry people, it can't stand against its own leaders turning on it.
 
They did so only after the August Coup in 1991 which destroyed trust in the Soviet government and because Yeltsin was an alternative.

Without the reforms there wouldn't have being need for a hardliner coup, nor would Yeltsin (or an equivalent) have gained the legitimacy (he was elected) nor the power (the CPUSSR's control over Republican leaders would have being maintained) to dissolve the Soviet Union.

This is a myopitic perspective on the sequence of internal events post-Brezhnev.
The mechanism(s) for political control of dissent were falling apart, due in large part to the perceive buffoonery of the last few years of Brezhnev rule - to put it simply, no one took the internal state security apparatus seriously anymore (hence Solidarity) and by 1985, this was inexorably irreversible.
The whole point of Glasnost was to reverse this trend after all - by opening the doors to discourse and at least air out the grevievces against the history of bureaucratic mismanagement.
Taking Gorbechev's reforms, or Yeltsin away doesn't not make these very real frustrations disappear and with the economy inevitibly grinding to a halt - it will come out and happen violently.
 
This is a myopitic perspective on the sequence of internal events post-Brezhnev.
The mechanism(s) for political control of dissent were falling apart, due in large part to the perceive buffoonery of the last few years of Brezhnev rule - to put it simply, no one took the internal state security apparatus seriously anymore (hence Solidarity) and by 1985, this was inexorably irreversible.
The whole point of Glasnost was to reverse this trend after all - by opening the doors to discourse and at least air out the grevievces against the history of bureaucratic mismanagement.
Taking Gorbechev's reforms, or Yeltsin away doesn't not make these very real frustrations disappear and with the economy inevitibly grinding to a halt - it will come out and happen violently.
This makes me wonder, was there room for a Soviet version of Xi Jinping? Right now Xi is presiding over decreasing economic growth, and while his anti-corruption campaign has definite factional motivations, it does have the very real effect of creating the impression among ordinary Chinese that the Party is doing something about the lazy and corrupt officialdom. If Gorbachev had decided to institute not glasnost but perestroika+a top-down cleanup of the Party, the USSR may have weathered political crisis and gotten its reformed economy.
 

RousseauX

Donor
This is a myopitic perspective on the sequence of internal events post-Brezhnev.
The mechanism(s) for political control of dissent were falling apart, due in large part to the perceive buffoonery of the last few years of Brezhnev rule - to put it simply, no one took the internal state security apparatus seriously anymore (hence Solidarity) and by 1985, this was inexorably irreversible.
Except in Poland the government was successful in suppressing solidarity and imposing martial law: as long as the Soviet Union gave some degree of support to the regime, the problem came when Gorbachev flat out said the Soviet Union isn't going to send in the troops to sustain socialism in the eastern bloc anymore and they are free to go their own way.

The whole point of Glasnost was to reverse this trend after all - by opening the doors to discourse and at least air out the grevievces against the history of bureaucratic mismanagement.
Taking Gorbechev's reforms, or Yeltsin away doesn't not make these very real frustrations disappear and with the economy inevitibly grinding to a halt - it will come out and happen violently.
Frustration and violent protests against the regime has being a feature since the 1920s: the Soviet regime had the tools to deal with it.

The mechanism(s) for political control of dissent were falling apart
What's the evidence for this?
 
As others have noted the main problem for the Soviet Union was that the costs of paying off all the parties that make up a state (such as the civil service, the army, and ordinary people) were getting higher and higher, while the amount of money the Soviets were pulling in was shrinking (in large part due to the fact that oil was falling and continued to fall until the late 1990s). The Soviet Union can't go totalitarian, because the political/social costs were far too high, so there's a limit to how repressive they can get. There's also the fact that there were a number of reformists within the Soviet leadership, and as the situation gets worse they're going to have an easier time pushing for reforms (the costs of maintaining hardline policies are going to be higher than the perceived cost of reforms).

Ultimately, I would say that if the Soviet Union can survive until the late 1990s, when oil prices go up, they can probably ride that wave for a while (it's basically what Putin has been riding off of until recently). However I'm skeptical that the Soviets can hold out that long, and I'm even more skeptical that they don't eventually try reforms before then, which would lead to a situation similar to OTL just later.
 
I don't think the fall would happen at any far off time (it could even happen earlier).
The Soviet economy was in a dire state by the 1980s and without reforms it would only continue. This is further strained by the US as Reagan would keep up the pressure in the arms race as the Soviets wouldn't reform their diplomacy either in TTL. This would lead to a total economic collapse not entirely unlike what is happening in Venezuela now, and the Soviet military would either crack down on the dissent and start another civil war or take the side of the protesters like they did in OTL.
 
An unreformed Soviet Union would still be around today. It wouldn't be a very nice place to live, but the regime would still be there.

Some points:
  • The food thing is a red herring. The Soviet Union by this time was importing grain for *animal* food.
  • The Soviet food issue was never actually production - it was distribution, with corruption and incompetence leave potatoes rotting in warehouses (false figures were then passed up the chain, which made planning more difficult). Improve the distribution networks (which means clamping down on corruption) and you improve the situation.
  • Even at a worst-case scenario, see Cuba's Special Period for an example of effective state rationing (if PR is an issue, blame decadent bureaucrats. It has the advantage of being true).
  • The Soviet Union had been through much worse situations than the mid-1980s and survived. Calling the collapse "inevitable" is nonsense (had the Soviets collapsed in the 1920s, people would be calling that inevitable too).
  • Without glasnost, the political situation would remain completely inert. People were used to keeping their heads down - it was Gorbachev that turned an economic crisis into a political crisis.
  • If we're talking hindsight, if the Soviet Union survived until the mid-to-late 1990s, it could have done a deal with China, trading oil and gas for cheap consumer products.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I don't think the fall would happen at any far off time (it could even happen earlier).
The Soviet economy was in a dire state by the 1980s and without reforms it would only continue. This is further strained by the US as Reagan would keep up the pressure in the arms race as the Soviets wouldn't reform their diplomacy either in TTL.
You could just fold conventional parity vs NATO, you really didn't need it as long as you had enough nukes to deter NATO from attacking you
This would lead to a total economic collapse not entirely unlike what is happening in Venezuela now, and the Soviet military would either crack down on the dissent and start another civil war or take the side of the protesters like they did in OTL.
The difference btwn Venezuela and the USSR is that the USSR is way more self-sufficient and way better able to hold out against shocks to oil prices than Venezuela
 
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