Soviet Union starts Chinese style

Rather, it's structured similarly if not the same to modern China's economic system. Central planning mixed with markets. The question is, what if this had arisen in the Soviet Union right off the bat? Now, how, I don't know, NEP gets expanded a lot. If they can ideologically justify that, they can ideologically justify this.

The question is, what impact would this have economically? China has rapidly become one of the most powerful economies in the world through that combination, would the Soviet Union have been able to do similarly?
 
Rather, it's structured similarly if not the same to modern China's economic system. Central planning mixed with markets. The question is, what if this had arisen in the Soviet Union right off the bat? Now, how, I don't know, NEP gets expanded a lot. If they can ideologically justify that, they can ideologically justify this.

The question is, what impact would this have economically? China has rapidly become one of the most powerful economies in the world through that combination, would the Soviet Union have been able to do similarly?

Wasn't Nikolai Bukharin the strongest supporter of the New Economic Policy among the high-ranking leadership of the Bolshevik Party? Any possibility of him becoming the eventual successor of Lenin?
 
Keep in mind access to capital

The PRC has two advantages:

  • unfettered access to Western capital to develop since the 1980's
  • no cultural allergy to entrepreneurialism.
  • They were physically and culturally secure enough to embrace capitalist management techniques, markets, etc. in ways even the NEP didn't approach in the USSR b/c the Chinese endured their own colossal cluster-hump Great Leap Forward and knew of the Stalinist self-inflicted catastrophes that made the Soviets an industrial colossus with clay feet.

The Soviets built their industry for their military, not so much for prosperity.
It's a lot easier to build stuff folks are issued, you don't have to worry about customer satisfaction or competition. When it comes to consumer goods, it ain't a closed market where you can dictate prices or whatever.
The toy-train model Gosplan used for economic planning had no price feedback mechanism for them to know what worked and what didn't.

IMO, butterflying the siege mentality from the 1920's on that characterized Soviet society would be helluva start. What ASB's do we need to make that happen?

We've just conducted a poll about the best intelligence services of WWII and IMO, the NKVD wins hands down. However, they pointed their analytical resources at foreign governments, not their economies or societies and didn't allow for dissenting voices.

Basically, you'd have to go for a Menshevik social-democratic state that used dirigisme or some flavor of ordoliberal economics to encourage internal development. I know, the Soviets were established thirty years before ordoliberal economics really got going, but could have adopted it in the 1950's.

Shevek or anyone with more intimate knowledge of Russian society can correct me on this, but IMO, the Russians'd need to embrace their Jewish and Central Asian Muslim entrepreneurs, make it more cool to emulate them and exploit their international contacts like the Chinese milked the expertise and cash of their diaspora. How likely that is, IDK.

Another biggie is rule of law. The Soviets were great about establishing that somebody was in power, but defining what he/she could do or not was strictly nominal and thus arbitrary. The Constitiution meant nothing when it conflicted with the needs of the state and as the Stalinists interpreted it, the state needed every bit of leeway to act as necessary, justice be damned. That doesn't build confidence in foreigners or locals trying to do something and profit from it. Altering both the attitudes and practices of that would go a long way toward making the Soviet Union an attractive place to invest with the other bits I've mentioned.
 
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