Soviet Union without WW-II

Political guesstimate:

Stalin, followed by Khrushchev, around (maybe a little after) his historical demise. No WW2, so while the party ranks are rotating, there is no equivalent to the Great Purge. But Khrushchev was fairly close to Stalin pre-1934 and an extremely capable politician, so he seems to be a likely result of the post-Stalin power struggle. Yagoda takes up Beria's role, but he'd be even worse off. Who comes after Khrushchev is an open question, likely influenced by global events (no Cuban revolution = longer Khrushchev term, for example), but Brezhnev's unlikely, since his rise to prominence started with WW2.

WW2 had a major influence on the psychology of the Soviet leadership; it put many in a siege mentality, fearing invasion. For the post-Khrushchev leadership, it was their defining experience as communists (rather than WW1 and the Civil War, as had been Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev's). Without it, there's likely to be a lot less tension between the USSR and the West.

Guesstimates of the Soviet economy without WW2 follow:

In total, the Soviet Union lost about 11 years of growth to WW2; the 20% loss for arming itself is about 4 years growth, and then there's the 7 year loss of fighting the war and recovering from it.

If we look at the labor surplus problem, where the late Soviet slowdown is due in large part to the reduction in excess labor supply in the countryside down to almost nothing, this means that a lack of WW2 will move the slowdown of the 1970s a decade earlier, into the Khrushchev era. A conversion from soft budget constraints to hard budget constraints (i.e. reduction in subsidization of inefficient factories) and green field investment rather than reconstruction (i.e. building new factories rather than improving old ones, which proved more efficient, though Brezhnev pursued the latter) would have been effective, and Khrushchev was the sort of man to pursue improvement plans on the large scale (e.g. Virgin Lands campaign), unlike the conservative Brezhnev.

Resource depletion also played a role in slowdown, however, and that probably wouldn't go too far backwards, since the Soviet Union was still consuming natural resources as it built up for WW2 and then fought it. After a while, European Russia's reserves were depleted and resource extraction had to move to Siberia, where it was much more expensive. Productivity declined by about 11% for ferrous metals in the 1975-85 period, and it was even worse for oil (21%) and coal (24%). This is a serious problem for the late USSR. On the other hand, without WW2 (which was the defining political experience for the post-Khrushchev leadership of the USSR), and possibly (though not certainly) the Cold War, then there is the very real possibility this problem will be compensated for with importation of these resources rather than dogged insistence on using domestic resources.

Another problem was growing inefficiency of the Soviet Union's energy consumption in its late era. In 1980, the USSR consumed .95 tons of oil equivalent per US$1000 of GDP, as compared to Canada (with a similar climate) which consumed .74 tons. In 1988, Canada was consuming .64, while the USSR was consuming .99. Switching to a more efficient management strategy would have required large-scale changes, which again is entirely possible if your name isn't Brezhnev.

As with many counterfactuals involving the USSR, this one gives it a better chance of survival, since the economic problems of the 70s and 80s can be avoided, dealt with, or prevented by a more competent administration.
 
Paul Cockshott, a Scottish computer scientist with an impressive background in Soviet economics, posted something on Revleft that I think illuminates this quite well. I'll post the relevant excerpts, emphasis mine
...No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Plans put forward at the start of the 20th century before socialists had to grapple with the real problems of running an economy and the real problems of war or impending war were bound to be only schematic and inadequate. I dont want to get into the problem of the state here, I want to concentrate on the issue of commodity production versus conscious and systematic distribution.

When these Russian Marxists wrote these things it was enough to say : conscious and systematic distribution. After they came to power they had to work out what that actually meant. There is a huge difference between stating a general aim in a few words, and saying just how this is to be achieved. There is even a big difference between stating an aim and proving that this aim is in principle feasible. They had to create the social structures that would process the information required for the conscious and systematic distribution of production. This is what Gosplan was intended to do, and to a significant extent succeeded in doing during the rapid industrialization of the 30s, the war planning and reconstruction of the 40s and the rapid growth of the 50s.

But as is widely known, there were considerable drawbacks to the Russian system of planning the economy. The plan targets were insufficiently detailed in terms of quality and product mix leading to waste and poor quality products. There was also an endemic problem of plants falsifying requirements and results. Methods of production were often irrational in the light of overall social costs. The system of material balances could only be extended to at most a few hundred goods by the early 50s, and thus targets had to be set in aggregate terms. Aggregation required a unit of aggregation, either Kilos or Roubles. So although buying and selling between independent firms stopped, all outputs being state property, state factories still had to keep accounts in Roubles of aggregate output and aggregate costs. So the aim of abolishing commodity production was only partially achieved.

The 'economic calculation problem' raised in the 20s and 30s by enemies of socialism, turned out, by the 50s to be very real.

It is worth recalling that the only socialists who took this problem seriously in the west were left social democrats like Lerner, Lange, Dickinson and that the solutions that they came up with were heavily influenced by neo-classical economic theory. These people advocated a form of market socialism – I which commodity production was retained under public ownership. They were the fore-runners of later schools of pro-market reforms in the eastern block.

The rise of this school both in eastern Europe and in China, was a response to real weaknesses in the existing system of conscious regulation of the economy, and thus of real weaknesses in the historically existing concept of socialism. It is no good simply denouncing these ideas unless you come up with another practical way of overcoming the economic calculation problem.

I would argue that the theoretical basis for actually solving the calculation problem did not exist until Kantorovich's work in the late 30s and these ideas did not become generally known until the late 50s. And even if Kantorovich provided a theoretical solution, it was wildly impractical to put into effect given the state of computer technology in the 50s. The first person to come up with a practical proposal to achieve what Bogdanov had proposed was Glushkov in the early 60s, but he warned Kosygin that to solve it you would have to build what we now call the internet, that it would take until the 1980s to develop and that it would cost more than the space programme and the nuclear weapons programme combined. Glushkov was right, and in failing to commit to the development, Kosygin sealed the long term fate of the USSR and of the first generation of socialist experiments
 
The success of the August Storm is to a large degree due to the lessons Red Army learned in the 4 years before that - although they managed to give Japanese a bloody nose before, at Nomonhan...

Well vastly superior and armour also had a lot to do with it, considering there would be no need to freeze production for the war effort you would probably have even better Soviet artillery and armour. Also if Shtern avodis the purges you have a top class commander commanding the theatre, not to mention the true victor of the Battle of Nomonhan.
 
Soviet Union's territorial integration may survive in its present day but the Communist leadership will not survive longer without WWII. Stalin may be overthrown. It would more easier to pull a China. Opening the economy to capitalism and foreign trade by 1950 then by 1990, political reform. Certainly, there would be no Cold War. Result is that Space Exploration will be retarded by 20 to 30 years than in OTL. Maybe reaching the Moon is just a dream because of Cold War's absence.
 
There's an old saying that no revolution outlives the revolutionaries. (It will be fascinating to see what happens in Cuba after the Castro brothers are gone.) The Soviet communist model got a psychological rejuvenation from the horrific but unifying experience of World War II, but it didn't survive the generation that fought it. Without the war and the Cold War competition with capitalism, I think it would have gone China -- a more open capitalistic economy run by a dictatorship clothed in the words but not the reality of Soviet-style communism.

Without the Cold War, I suspect many of our current technological advances, including perhaps the Internet, would have been considerably delayed. No Moon race, for example, and all the advances that came from that.
 
Without WWII and thus recovery from the Great Depression, the US might go commie as well. We might end up with the European countries (and their colonies, where they'll be fighting left-wing independence movement) being left as the last bastion of Capitalism.

Workers of the world, ONWARDS!:D
 
No looting of technologies and industries from defeated Germany either. And I doubt amount of money Soviet Union put in its satellites was bigger that amount drained from them at the same time.

Which didn’t replace even 25% the industrial losses suffered (to say nothing of the social/demographic costs and long term economic effects of losing 30 million people and almost two entire generations of manpower of military age) and process was reversed by the time the DDR (East Germany) came into existence, with the Soviets propping them up.

To the tech point, before Hitler the Soviet were trading for tech with the Germans and without the Cold War could simply buy technology from anyone willing to sell even the USA.

Again agree with eveything IBC says. The fact is that without WW2 the U.S.S.R/Union is much more likely to survive and be in much better shape. The Communist regime/CPSU may still fall, through without the Cold War and WW2 reform is more likely and the economic outlook for the Soviets is immeasurably better. As I have the opinion that the Soviets Union never really recovered from WW2.
 
Again agree with eveything IBC says. The fact is that without WW2 the U.S.S.R/Union is much more likely to survive and be in much better shape. The Communist regime/CPSU may still fall, through without the Cold War and WW2 reform is more likely and the economic outlook for the Soviets is immeasurably better. As I have the opinion that the Soviets Union never really recovered from WW2.
Have to agree that the Union is a lot more likely to survive, though the Communist regime is likely to either fall or undergo serious reforms post-Stalin. Without the boost to reputation provided by World War II, Stalin won't have much to justify his tyrannical actions, so resisting any sort of impulse for reform is going to be that much harder.

I would assume that no WW II also means no annexations of territory under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which will do quite a bit to boost the survival of the USSR. Having three members of the USSR who never wanted to be part of the USSR and would have gladly left the instant they had the freedom to do so was not a good thing for maintaining the unity of the system.
 
I think the most interesting dynamic of this would be that nuclear technology would not be around until quite considerably later, and the Russians would be in much better shape to conduct an arms race. Indeed, they may have even developed the technology before the USA, and in this case preventative war is probably a lot more likely than it was the other way around - because Russia is an authoritarian state, for one.
 
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