Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics

I would argue this would be unavoidable.
Yeah, that abandoning socialism in favour of liberalism was going to have unavoidably awful consequences no matter what is kind of the main point I'm trying to get across. It was a catastrophic policy that destroyed the country. And any scenario that has a USSR survives but turn liberal is a scenario with a ruined country in it
 
Yeah, that abandoning socialism in favour of liberalism was going to have unavoidably awful consequences no matter what is kind of the main point I'm trying to get across. It was a catastrophic policy that destroyed the country. And any scenario that has a USSR survives but turn liberal is a scenario with a ruined country in it

I would also note that scenarios which do not see the USSR liberalize will see the country fare poorly. Paul Kennedy's classic assessment of the Soviet predicament in the 1980s in his The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, in which he notes how the many potentially existential issues of the Soviet state (the Cold War with the West and China, its economic and technological shortcomings, its military weaknesses, its internal ethnic and demographic issues) were both intermixed and effectively insoluble given Soviet ideology, is telling. Without those changes, the Soviet Union is bound to stagnate.

(A Chinese trajectory of reformed state capitalism also seems very unlikely. Ignoring how not the PRC but western Europe was the model favoured by Soviet populations, the Soviet Union was too developed to enjoy the easy early productivity gains of the PRC. The Soviet Union faced the much more challenging task of escaping the middle-income trap.)
 
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I would also note that scenarios which do not see the USSR liberalize will see the country fare poorly. Paul Kennedy's classic assessment of the Soviet predicament in the 1980s in his The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, in which he notes how the many potentially existential issues of the Soviet state (the Cold War with the West and China, its economic and technological shortcoming, its military weaknesses, its internal ethnic and demographic issues) were both intermixed and effectively insoluble given Soviet ideology, is telling. Without those changes, the Soviet Union is bound to stagnate.

(A Chinese trajectory of reformed state capitalism also seems very unlikely. Ignoring how not the PRC but western Europe was the model favoured by Soviet populations, the Soviet Union was too developed to enjoy the easy early productivity gains of the PRC. The Soviet Union faced the much more challenging task of escaping the middle-income trap.)
The Soviet Union was burdened with many issues by the 80s, all sorts of problems it had started accumulating since Khrushchev's revionism, and some since before that even. But it wasn't a failing state destined to collapse before Gorbachev. A man might have liver problems, but if you stab him in the chest, that's probably going to be what kills him, even if having other health issues makes treatment (and avoiding death) harder. To claim that he was destined to die because he had a long history of lier problems and that the knife was inevitable is silly
 
Khrushchev's revionism
Well, yes, stop sending people to the Gulag for nothing is revisionism

collapse before Gorbachev
In fact, the USSR passed the point of no return when it failed to implement a price reform in 1988 along with other points of transition to a more market economy. The sooner the USSR starts restructuring the economy, the easier it will be for the people. So blame Ryzhkov for the collapse of the USSR
 
The Soviet Union was burdened with many issues by the 80s, all sorts of problems it had started accumulating since Khrushchev's revionism, and some since before that even. But it wasn't a failing state destined to collapse before Gorbachev. A man might have liver problems, but if you stab him in the chest, that's probably going to be what kills him, even if having other health issues makes treatment (and avoiding death) harder. To claim that he was destined to die because he had a long history of lier problems and that the knife was inevitable is silly

The Soviet Union was starting to stagger as early as the late 1960s, when life expectancy began to fall. It had great achievements in human and economic development, but these seem to have been a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit (an achievement, to be sure). This was linked to the general theme of post-Khrushchev stagnation: The systematic failure of the Soviet economy, second-largest in the world and with immense human resources, to innovate and escape the middle-income trap, left it surpassed first by peers then by countries once much poorer. This had implications for living standards and Soviet power.

The Soviet condition might have seen superficially stable, but it was bound to implode when there was a shock. Such a shock was going to come, whether through internal failures or external shocks. We are lucky that Kennedy's observation that declining powers need a war to trigger their implosion did not come true here.
 
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Well, yes, stop sending people to the Gulag for nothing is revisionism


In fact, the USSR passed the point of no return when it failed to implement a price reform in 1988 along with other points of transition to a more market economy. The sooner the USSR starts restructuring the economy, the easier it will be for the people. So blame Ryzhkov for the collapse of the USSR

Ideally if Khrushchev had been able to pull a Gorbachev-style transition, the Soviet Union might well have been able to move forward. The 1960s was perhaps the last decade; the 1970s was, perhaps, today late.
 
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the Soviet Union might well have been able to move forward.
With correctly played cards, the USSR could catch up with Spain by 2020 in terms of per capita GDP at PPP (because I cannot immediately predict the behavior of the TTL ruble by 2020) and be any richer than Poland with PoD in 1988
 
With correctly played cards, the USSR could catch up with Spain by 2020 in terms of per capita GDP at PPP (because I cannot immediately predict the behavior of the TTL ruble by 2020) and be any richer than Poland with PoD in 1988

I see no reason why it could not be on the lower edges of the high-income club, assuming sufficiently good and well-timed reforms.

The big problem is how political issues get managed. We can go from the success of Spain to the implosion of Yugoslavia.
 
The big problem is how political issues get managed. We can go from the success of Spain to the implosion of Yugoslavia.
The trick is to stabilize the economy quickly enough. The need for reforms set in motion a process that ended in free elections and opposition victories, but with a stable economy, Ukraine will be Quebec, not those who buried the USSR.
 
The trick is to stabilize the economy quickly enough. The need for reforms set in motion a process that ended in free elections and opposition victories, but with a stable economy, Ukraine will be Quebec, not those who buried the USSR.

This would be a trick that Yugoslavia did not manage, despite a better starting position than the USSR.
 
This would be a trick that Yugoslavia did not manage, despite a better starting position than the USSR
SFRY shot in its leg with 1974 Constitution. The Yugoslav communists themselves did with the federation what it the Soviets need a year of struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev
 
I am just preparing for the publication of the TL, where the issues of preserving the USSR after 1989 will be considered.
I did it
 
No, but Yelstins rise to power was only possible because of Gorbachev's policies effectively destroying the USSR. Gelatin is a direct consequence of Gorbachev, I don't see how this is in any way controversial.
Yeltsins rise was because of the growing distance between the Soviet Union as a political body and it's constituent republics. This was not a straight line relationship, it was an immense administrative nightmare occuring at the same time as an economic decline that had been taking place since Brezhnev's death, and a disastrous social crisis over alcoholism - Yeltsin rose in the Russian Communist Party, not CPSU, largely because Russia was beginning to be assertive of its own interests and was less interested in continuing to subsidize the Central Asian Republics. If Russia withdrew from the USSR, the whole project collapses.
 
SFRY shot in its leg with 1974 Constitution. The Yugoslav communists themselves did with the federation what it the Soviets need a year of struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev

That did not help, to be sure.

I would note that the second Yugoslavia started out with key advantages that the Soviet Union did not have. There were abundant interethnic atrocities in the Second World War, notably the Croatian massacres of the Ustashe but also the Serbian Chetnik massacres of non-Serbs. These were repressed with equal ferocity by the Communists, who went on to build a genuinely fair decentralized system that was not obviously dominated by one ethnic group or its nationalism-defined interests. The Second Yugoslavia could not be fairly called a Greater Serbia.

I do not think the same can be said about the Soviet Union. Ukrainians and Kazakhs, to name but two major groups, could fairly call the mass deaths from famine that hit both nations in the 1930s genocides ordered from the top. The Soviet Union went on, 1920s nation-building aside, to be a potent vehicle for Russification, for the spread of Russian language and culture at the expense of other ethnolinguistic groups. Much of this had to do with normatice opinion among Russians that these groups were irrelevant, at best of folkloric interest, at worst actually confused Russians whose issues should not be taken seriously.

Especially if there is going to be an economic crash in the 1990s, something that I think will be unavoidable, any post-Soviet federation will have to satisfy both the demands of Russia and the skepticism of non-Russians. What will this federation offer?
 
Yeltsins rise was because of the growing distance between the Soviet Union as a political body and it's constituent republics. This was not a straight line relationship, it was an immense administrative nightmare occuring at the same time as an economic decline that had been taking place since Brezhnev's death, and a disastrous social crisis over alcoholism - Yeltsin rose in the Russian Communist Party, not CPSU, largely because Russia was beginning to be assertive of its own interests and was less interested in continuing to subsidize the Central Asian Republics. If Russia withdrew from the USSR, the whole project collapses.

The consensus seems to be that Russia was uninterested in a reformed Soviet federation that excluded Ukraine, because a political union that separated Russia from Ukraine while uniting it with Muslim Central Asia was widely seen as working against Russian national interests.
 
Yeltsin rose in the Russian Communist Party
Russian Communist Party is not Yeltsinites but his enemies. RCP was fundamentalist commies and Soviet unionists. Yeltsin broke up with CPSU in 1988 and dressed the democratic toga

Soviet federation that excluded Ukraine, because a political union that separated Russia from Ukraine while uniting it with Muslim Central Asia was widely seen as working against Russian national interests.
Actually unionist like Democratic Party of Russia leader Nikolai Travkin or Sergey Baburin, breaking some records in my TL. The USSR without Ukraine could work if Russia would ruled by Gorby's puppet like Aleksandr Vlasov or unionist like Travkin (and this sub-PoD was possible for my TL). If you think about it, it was even funny because of the picture of the division of Crimea between Ukraine and Russia in according Art. 3 Soviet Secession Law

But 100% option is dissolution of the Russian Federation on regions of England smaller republics like Siberian or Volga SSR. The idea of creating macro-regions in Russia went around in certain circles in the 1980s, and even Yeltsin positively mentioned this idea
 
As long as national and ethnic conflicts (Chechnya, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, etc.) are not resolved peacefully, this Union of Sovereign States wouldn't last for long. Remember that perestroika opened up the Pandora's box of nationalist sentiment which had been suppressed for decades.
 
Russian Communist Party is not Yeltsinites but his enemies. RCP was fundamentalist commies and Soviet unionists. Yeltsin broke up with CPSU in 1988 and dressed the democratic toga


Actually unionist like Democratic Party of Russia leader Nikolai Travkin or Sergey Baburin, breaking some records in my TL. The USSR without Ukraine could work if Russia would ruled by Gorby's puppet like Aleksandr Vlasov or unionist like Travkin (and this sub-PoD was possible for my TL). If you think about it, it was even funny because of the picture of the division of Crimea between Ukraine and Russia in according Art. 3 Soviet Secession Law

But 100% option is dissolution of the Russian Federation on regions of England smaller republics like Siberian or Volga SSR. The idea of creating macro-regions in Russia went around in certain circles in the 1980s, and even Yeltsin positively mentioned this idea

That dissolution of the Russian federation would definitely be one way to weaken Russian political power. Would there be any interest in that particular trajectory?

As long as national and ethnic conflicts (Chechnya, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, etc.) are not resolved peacefully, this Union of Sovereign States wouldn't last for long. Remember that perestroika opened up the Pandora's box of nationalist sentiment which had been suppressed for decades.

I think that it could survive so long as the interethnic conflict is limited. This federation could manage to handle interethnic violence in the fringes so long as it could be limited; Northern Irish and Basque terrorism did not obviously fatally threaten the British or Spanish states, even in the territories where the conflict occurred. What would end it would be tension or conflict between central populations, like Russians and Ukrainians or Russians and Kazakhs.
 
The Soviet Union was starting to stagger as early as the late 1960s, when life expectancy began to fall. It had great achievements in human and economic development, but these seem to have been a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit (an achievement, to be sure). This was linked to the general theme of post-Khrushchev stagnation: The systematic failure of the Soviet economy, second-largest in the world and with immense human resources, to innovate and escape the middle-income trap, left it surpassed first by peers then by countries once much poorer. This had implications for living standards and Soviet power.

The Soviet condition might have seen superficially stable, but it was bound to implode when there was a shock. Such a shock was going to come, whether through internal failures or external shocks. We are lucky that Kennedy's observation that declining powers need a war to trigger their implosion did not come true here.
Unless Afghanistan is that war
 
The Soviet Union was starting to stagger as early as the late 1960s, when life expectancy began to fall. It had great achievements in human and economic development, but these seem to have been a matter of seizing low-hanging fruit (an achievement, to be sure). This was linked to the general theme of post-Khrushchev stagnation: The systematic failure of the Soviet economy, second-largest in the world and with immense human resources, to innovate and escape the middle-income trap, left it surpassed first by peers then by countries once much poorer. This had implications for living standards and Soviet power.

The Soviet condition might have seen superficially stable, but it was bound to implode when there was a shock. Such a shock was going to come, whether through internal failures or external shocks. We are lucky that Kennedy's observation that declining powers need a war to trigger their implosion did not come true here.
The superficial stability came as a result of the high oil prices of the 1970s - it was clear that upon the abandonment of the Kosygin reforms, which might have if carried out fully, led to a more sustainable industrial picture, Soviet industry, with it's fixation on more and more production of capital equipment, was becoming an anchor on the state. They knew this in the late 60s. But they had no incentive to make alterations in the 70s because the inefficiency of Soviet industry was papered over by gains from the oil sector.

They could have invested those gains in improvements in industrial structure, or the development of the sprouts of a consumer economy. This was not done - there were some good investments into infrastructure but mostly it was military hardware, and a feeding frenzy for the elite.

The 80s around the world presented challenges to industrial economies everywhere, and most countries had to make painful decisions regarding expenditure and efficiency of state supported industries. But it was not a complete catastrophe everywhere - Israel and the US dealt with inflation, Britain with a sharp rise in unemployment, France with diminishing growth, Canada with a combination of the 3, etc, but the economic problems were eventually surmountable. The Soviet Union was a different story - it was so dependent on oil revenues and had an industrial structure that was so brittle that it wasn't able to find a soft landing.


That being said, the dissolution of the USSR was first and foremost a political crisis over the governing structure and only secondarily a social and economic collapse
 
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