The Cold War

Any chance for Cold War to survive into XXI century? With WP/USSR and NATO/US still standing in Mexican standoff?
 
Maybe Kosygin reforms are sucessful?

Philip Hanson in "Rise and Fall of the Soviet" economy is not complementary about the Kosygin reforms. In essence, Kosygin would have steered the Soviet Union down the same path as the East Bloc satellites in his view (and the satellites were going down an even worse path than the Soviet Union itself).

It would be fun to look in detail at what Kosygin was actually trying to do though, and look at how similar reforms went wrong and why, to see if it would really be all that grim.

Because Gorby wasn't the cause, why USSR died.

Gorbachev absolutely was - when he removed the Party from sole power in the Soviet Union he removed the keystone of the arch.

The economic problems were irritants in comparison.

fasquardon
 
Maybe Kosygin reforms are sucessful? Because Gorby wasn't the cause, why USSR died. It's all was going slowly from the start of seventies...

I think we'd have to have a POD in which Brezhnev did NOT manage to completely take over. I admit to
not knowing much re any reforms Kosygin put forth,; but I do know Brezhnev was @ the least rather
conservative(he rehabilitated, to an extent, Stalin after Khrushchev had taken him down a few pegs)&
@ the most, quite content to keep things exactly as they were. A marvelous joke that went the rounds in Russia in the late 1970's puts it best. It seems a train carrying Brezhnev, Khruschvez, & Stalin keeps grinding to a halt after going on for a ways. What to do? Stalin says: "Shoot the engineers. Exile
the crew. Get someone new." K on the other hand is for pardoning any exiled crew members & giving
them their jobs back. And Brezhnev? "Pull down the shades and pretend we're moving."*

*- Quoted in Hedrick Smith, THE NEW RUSSIANS(1990), p. 24.
 
Top