Reformist Successor of Khruschev?

"Alternate History and the Cold War" said that the last real chance for the Soviet Union to win the Cold War ended with Khruschev's stepdown after Cuban Missile Crisis. His popularity collapsed and he was replaced by Brezhnev who ossified the whole Soviet system.

But what if somehow Khrushchev didn't place the missiles in Cuba and he kept on reigning to reform the Soviet economy and politic?
He would stepdown eventually, so who his successor would be?
And by that, could the USSR won the Cold War this time?

Thanks in advance!
 
What do you mean by 'win the Cold War'? USSR IMHO could never win the Cold War in a sense of it staying Communist, while USA and West would collapse in a scenario that would be the reverse of glasnost or something. USSR could perhaps make something like China out of itself (though to get Soviet citizens to accept the living standards of Chinese workers would be hard? Impossible?) but then what?

It would get integrated into Western system in the sense China is now and would still lose Cold War. This scenario could make better overall outcome, but Soviet Union is not stable enough to make this solution workable.
 
What do you mean by 'win the Cold War'? USSR IMHO could never win the Cold War in a sense of it staying Communist, while USA and West would collapse in a scenario that would be the reverse of glasnost or something. USSR could perhaps make something like China out of itself (though to get Soviet citizens to accept the living standards of Chinese workers would be hard? Impossible?) but then what?

It would get integrated into Western system in the sense China is now and would still lose Cold War. This scenario could make better overall outcome, but Soviet Union is not stable enough to make this solution workable.

While that kind of win is impossible the USSR would win the Cold War if the US largely was forced to withdraw from the outside world and focus mainly on their internal situation.
 
Is there any way to get the missiles in Turkey and their removal linked in the public mind with the removal of the missiles in Cuba, either after the fact or as part of an alternate deal? If you can achieve that then Khruschev can point at it and at least claim success in facing down the US.
 
Is there any way to get the missiles in Turkey and their removal linked in the public mind with the removal of the missiles in Cuba, either after the fact or as part of an alternate deal? If you can achieve that then Khruschev can point at it and at least claim success in facing down the US.

Well I dont know about the party leadership but if the line to the public was "We need to place these missiles inside Cuba in response to the US placing missiles in Turkey we could see him maintain his popularity if then the US removed the missiles in Turkey.
 
The USSR winning the Cold War is an extremely improbable POD, in no small part because its best shot at this is the USA really, really getting a case of the Stupids and intervening with a major war when its army is at its weakest and its overall disillusionment is rising in tune with the USSR reaching *its* global peak. This, however, is not what the presence or absence or any action on the part of Brehznev can affect.
 
The best that I can see them achieving is a reform of their economy and then a slow transition to something along Chinese lines - still fairly authoritarian but with a mixed economy, the government continuing to control the infrastructure and certain key sectors whilst allowing a market economy elsewhere. But that's only if they play their cards right, try liberalising socially before getting the economy on a better footing like Gorbachev did and the whole edifice is likely to come crashing down. More likely I think is thaty the Soviet economy is somewhat less fucked up before the revolutions kick off and they transition to market economies.
 
The best that I can see them achieving is a reform of their economy and then a slow transition to something along Chinese lines - still fairly authoritarian but with a mixed economy, the government continuing to control the infrastructure and certain key sectors whilst allowing a market economy elsewhere. But that's only if they play their cards right, try liberalising socially before getting the economy on a better footing like Gorbachev did and the whole edifice is likely to come crashing down. More likely I think is thaty the Soviet economy is somewhat less fucked up before the revolutions kick off and they transition to market economies.
The Soviet economy was a market economy, just an autarkic one sustained by magic and graft through unofficial markets.

Frankly, they'd have been better off trying to make economic planning work than trying to do China. China managed to integrate itself into the world capitalist market because they were sufficiently non-threatening, and a tactical ally of the US in the Cold War. The Soviet Union has no such advantage, and Chinese market reforms or not, will not be able to integrate into the world economy. No one will allow it, especially the United States, so long as they are the Soviet Union.
 
Getting the USSR to "win" the Cold War is impossible since America simply isn't going to implode no matter how successful the USSR becomes. So a better question to ask would be "could the USSR have reformed itself into something that could survive with the vibrancy of 1st World nations?" and I think the answer is yes. Khrushchev was actually a decent leader from what I gather and all you'd have to do is avoid Brezhnev's idiocies and get someone more economically focused into power. At the same time it would be good to pursue a detente policy would the West and eventually open up trade with them.

EDIT: *Looks at Jello Biafra's post: Or...not, it seems.
 
The Soviet economy was a market economy, just an autarkic one sustained by magic and graft through unofficial markets.

Eh, where was the market in this? No private possession and all.

I am centrist and point foolishness from the right, but I have to point the same on left.

USSR was far-left for sure. Communist maybe not, but far-left for sure.
 
Eh, where was the market in this? No private possession and all.

I am centrist and point foolishness from the right, but I have to point the same on left.

USSR was far-left for sure. Communist maybe not, but far-left for sure.
We shouldn't uncritically accept Soviet propaganda about their economic system either.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Soviet economy wasn't centrally planned, for all of their pretense about the subject. And the bureaucratic climate of the Stalinist era is precisely what led to this. The First Five Year Plan was, for the most part, not an actual economic plan. It was a set of political directives to the managers of the various state-owned enterprises: produce results or there will be consequences.

But the process of planning didn't change the market driven, state capitalist character of the Soviet economy. In fact, it made it worse. As was noted by Walter Daum in The Life and Death of Stalinism, "A significant feature of the Stalinist economy is its subdivision into separate ministries acting in many ways like the giant corporations of the West: they compete among each other for shares of the system’s overall
resources, but cannot completely suppress internal competitive tendencies."

The Plans themselves weren't actually plans in any predictive sense, merely a descriptive account of the of the bargaining between the various subdivisions over resources, and their trade over resources. Hence, these "plans" were constantly revised, and why they were always post dated from actual publication time.

Furthermore, as I previously stated, the actual economy, outside the pretesnses of Stalinist apparatchiks, ran on magic and graft. Firms hoarded resources illegally, both for personal use as well as to hedge against failures to resupply. The political elites, in turn, set new goals to force the apparatchiks to use their grafted resources to meet targets. This game ensured only continued misallocation of resources, and the dependency on semi-official expeditors and markets to trade for the needed resources for production and capital replenishment.

But many firms simply resorted to unofficial production. So rather than rely on the unplanned chaos and the fact that everyone else was running their enterprise like a personal fiefdom, many simply opted to produce needed inputs themselves, entirely outside of the plan. Something like 80 percent of industrial firms, for example, would produce their own bolts, screws, etc., often up to and including major capital goods.

In other words, the whole thing was a top-down parody of monopoly capitalism, draped in red bunting.
 
We shouldn't uncritically accept Soviet propaganda about their economic system either.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Soviet economy wasn't centrally planned, for all of their pretense about the subject. And the bureaucratic climate of the Stalinist era is precisely what led to this. The First Five Year Plan was, for the most part, not an actual economic plan. It was a set of political directives to the managers of the various state-owned enterprises: produce results or there will be consequences.

But the process of planning didn't change the market driven, state capitalist character of the Soviet economy. In fact, it made it worse. As was noted by Walter Daum in The Life and Death of Stalinism, "A significant feature of the Stalinist economy is its subdivision into separate ministries acting in many ways like the giant corporations of the West: they compete among each other for shares of the system’s overall
resources, but cannot completely suppress internal competitive tendencies."

The Plans themselves weren't actually plans in any predictive sense, merely a descriptive account of the of the bargaining between the various subdivisions over resources, and their trade over resources. Hence, these "plans" were constantly revised, and why they were always post dated from actual publication time.

Furthermore, as I previously stated, the actual economy, outside the pretesnses of Stalinist apparatchiks, ran on magic and graft. Firms hoarded resources illegally, both for personal use as well as to hedge against failures to resupply. The political elites, in turn, set new goals to force the apparatchiks to use their grafted resources to meet targets. This game ensured only continued misallocation of resources, and the dependency on semi-official expeditors and markets to trade for the needed resources for production and capital replenishment.

But many firms simply resorted to unofficial production. So rather than rely on the unplanned chaos and the fact that everyone else was running their enterprise like a personal fiefdom, many simply opted to produce needed inputs themselves, entirely outside of the plan. Something like 80 percent of industrial firms, for example, would produce their own bolts, screws, etc., often up to and including major capital goods.

In other words, the whole thing was a top-down parody of monopoly capitalism, draped in red bunting.

Is there a world example of central planning than that we can base its performance on?

To the OP... hell no. There is no way for the USSR to win the Cold War with a POD that late. Now, could the USSR have won the Cold War? Perhaps, but it would've required a much longer stretch of time than its loss did.

The earliest POD to allow for a SU Cold War victory is one where they beat the Nazis with far less casualties, and have control over mainland Europe.
 
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