USSR does a China!

You heard!

Sometimes proposed as a way for the Soviet Union to survive: instead of politically liberalising - and then collapsing - it 'does a China', and economically liberalises,while keeping politics much the same. This appears to have worked OK in OTL China, hence the 'doing a China.'
I realise this is being covered in LacheyS's 'Gorbachev mk. 2', but I would like to see other, shorter suggestions...

What does it take for the Soviet leadership, at some point, to decide that the economic system they have in place simply isn't right for the country, and must be shifted to some kind of mixed economy? The only limit I will place on this is that it should be at least a few years after the NEP has been abandoned - shall we say 1935 at the very earliest? We can have a POD before that point, it's just that liberalisation should not be adopted before '35 or so. Other than that, there are no real limits - I want to hear your suggestions, people!

- what could the reasoning be to do this?
- who might need to be in charge?
- does the general world situation need to be different - no, or reduced, Great Depression?
 
Well 1) Lenin does the world a little good before he shuffles off this mortal coil and makes sure Sovnarkom know Stalin is a dangerous individual. Him out of the picture its a straight struggled between 'Marshal' Trotsky and the CPSU Right.

2) Despite popularity within the Army ranks, the Moscow leadership weren't too keen on Trotsky, wereas Bukarin and Rykov were well-know theorists and strong supporters of NEP, combined they had a strong chance to push Trotsky out, however whether they'd get the chance before he did is uncertain

3) If by 1929 NEP is still going strong (The Scissor Crisis would have be oslved through some tough price freezes and bayonet charges), American investment in still on, the Soviet Union might quickly become a major world trade partner as the Depression rides in, itself relatively untouched by it all.

4) Without Stalin's machinations as General-Secretary, Party membership would remain a lot more limited. While this would no doubt de-polticise Soviet society a great deal, it would also mean the CPSU was alot more elitist, confined purely to proven revolutionaries, generals, intellectuals etc. Whatever knock-on this would have to Soviet society and perceptions of Communism as a whole I'm not sure but it would probably strengthen the 'conservative' anti-democrat powermongers alot

5) Also with their being no informal succession line via General-Secretarys, we might see a more Chinese style of change over with generations of Party newcomers handing over gradually, meaning alot less emphasis based on Glorious Leaders and more on the Party oligarchy as a whole

All in all, (butterflies with Hitler and WWII aside) The USSR by the late 1930's might have started on the road to being a powerful economic/commercial force, albeit one detached from the West (ala our China)
 
If you're going to have a PoD after the end of the NEP, then it's going to be hard to do it before the 1970s. After all, it's often forgotten that the Soviet economy was growing at a very strong rate up to the 1960s, and was still growing slowly until 1980-ish (I forget exactly, call it plus or minus five years). While it was recognized there were problems, it was generally thought that these were simply implementation details (like Krushchev's "chemicalisation"); the communists were no more interested in switching to capitalism because of them than, say, President Bush was interested in becoming a socialist because of the collapse of Enron.

By the 1970s the problems were starting to became more apparent, and various tinkering approaches started being tried, most with little or no benefit. By this point, pulling a China has become much more difficult. When China started liberalizing, most of its population were rural peasants, not involved in state industrial enterprise. Thus, there were plenty of low-hanging fruits of productivity increase for western investors to exploit, since there was plenty of cheap labor and, compared to the USSR, a small state sector. By the 1970s, almost everyone in the USSR worked for the state, one way or another, and there was already a sizeable state industrial system. This means that it would be comparatively harder for foreign investors to realize productivity gains, and labor is higher priced: after all, to a Chinese peasant in 1980 a life in a factory might sound like a good deal. A Russian factory worker's not interested; life under capitalism sounds like basically what he's got now except with less job security.

I'm not saying it can't be done. But I think it'd be pretty hard, if the POD has to be after the end of NEP. Now, if it's before the end of NEP, I think we've got a much better shot. That said, it should be remembered that NEP was not the proto-capitalism a lot of people seem to think it was: the state continued to run the "commanding heights" of the economy like banking, heavy industry, and resource extraction, private economic operations were limited to light industry and some agriculture, and foreign investment was close to zero. That was why the Soviets abandoned NEP for a purely state-operated setup: NEP didn't work.

I think the best shot might be to go all the way back to before the Bolshevik Revolution, and change Lenin's mind about the feasibility of "state-run capitalism" (which was what the Soviet economy was, after all; under Marxist-Leninist theory the USSR was never socialist). Traditional pre-Leninist theory, after all, says capitalism is a necessary stage of historical development; that was part of why the non-Bolshevik communists in Russia ended up consigned to the "ash heap of history"-they wanted to have a parlaimentary democracy and free society where everything was owned by the bourgouise (sp?), because they thought that you just HAD to have that before you could get to the good stuff. There were other factors, too, of course, but that was part of it.

Actually, though, I think it would be easier to get a successful state-run economy than a China-style economic boom. But then, I'm one of those fools who think non-capitalist economies can actually succeed on occasion.
 
Hmm... thanks, Asnys.

Yes, the traditional Marxist idea of a set progression - Feudalism=> Capitalism=> Communism - was what I was thinking of.

OK, maybe setting it after the retreat from NEP is a bad idea... I just thought it would be more interesting if it was a shift away, then back towards capitalism, rather than starting that way and carrying on. Something like, the Soviet leadership of the '30s (doesn't have to be Stalin & co.) decide that they were too hasty, and that they should have let capitalism in Russia advance further. After all, did not Marx himself argue that Britain, the most advanced capitalist nation, would be the first to become Communist? And since this didn't seem to be happening, surely Russia had even further to go before it could naturally progress to a communist society?
Seems to make sense, don't you think? ;-)

On your last point: well, it all depends on how you define 'success', of course... :)
On pretty much all measures except that of pure economic growth and political freedom, Cuba seems to be an example of a 'successful' state-run economy. In fact, they went through an artificially-imposed Peak Oil in the '90s, and apparently emerged better for it... but that's rather off-topic.
 
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