USSR doing significantly more radical economic reforms than it did in our timeline

I do not know if that would be possible, it is more a speculation, but, was it possible the Soviet Union undergo reforms to the same level as China has with Deng Xiaoping? And have the same success?
Who could be this Xiaoping Soviet?
 
As far as I know, both Andropov and Kosygin were fit to help reform the USSR economically speaking, though I did read that the USSR was quite different from China in that it stuck with being Communist while China didn't and only was so in name only. If you're talking about the Soviet Deng then the closet you would get would be Andropov, though again he might make the USSR economically sound rather than make it communist in name only.
 
The USSR's problem wasn't in how radical (or not) it was but rather because in tried to reform the wrong things.

Like the way the USSR chose to privatize enterprises BEFORE price reforms, so assets were sold to insiders for fictional prices.

Or the way Gorbachev eliminated the power of the Communist party (the only force keeping the USSR united) BEFORE negotiating a new union treaty (that could have provided an alternate basis for the union to continue).

The list goes on.

The fall of the USSR was a result of catastrophic investment choices followed by catastrophic political choices. Being more radical and continuing to chose the wrong things to invest in or the wrong political reforms would only lead to the situation getting worse.

Andropov and Kosygin were fit to help reform the USSR economically speaking

Andropov's anti-corruption campaign could have borne great fruits if it had continued for longer. There was an enormous need to clear out dead wood and bad actors after the Brezhnev years. It was a great shame for the USSR that he died so soon and the anti-corruption campaign ground to a halt due to Gorbachev's need to secure his power. (And this is another area where China was luckier - they also had a major anti-corruption drive before Deng started his major reforms - no point in trying to reform things if the middle management don't have any interest in carrying the reforms through.)

I used to be a big fan of Kosygin, but my recent reading has led me to question how much benefit his reforms could have brought the USSR.

On the good side (potentially) one of his reforms in particular (never fully implemented) basically introduced the concept of "value added" into Soviet management and planning - if that reform had been pushed more, the Soviet Union could have greatly improved the quality of its goods, the resource and labour efficiency of its enterprises, with potentially far-reaching positive effects.

On the bad side (potentially), the general thrust of his reforms was towards a more Hungarian "market communist" way of doing things, and some argue that this would have made things even worse in the long run. The argument being that market communism diverts the surplus of the country into subsidizing consumption by individuals, thus starving investment. It is essentially a half-way house between Stalinism and capitalism with the advantages of neither system. I've not read enough about why market communism failed however, so I've not yet drawn my on conclusion on whether these arguments hold any water.

fasquardon
 

raharris1973

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I wonder if to a great extent China was more ready submit to far-reaching reforms because the Cultural Revolution thoroughly "tenderized" the Chinese bureaucracy and caused chaos, and living standards were at such a low base. By contrast the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, while dysfunctional in many ways, had led to a few decades under a more stable system with a higher level of consumption, leaving too many people more comfortable with stagnation than radical change.
 
Note that Chinese "reforms" very largely repudiate the basic concept of a Marxist movement; abandoning the idea of getting away from a market economy and instead making the government the ultimate cartel.

I believe this works in China because the main think the Chinese Communists under Mao delivered was effective order. Communism allowed China to be an effective nation state in the modern world at all, therefore the Chinese public will allow it to go in any direction that works.

Leninism in Russia on the other hand had to promise more. Tsarism was a poor form of government in the modern world, but it did work, as well as the PRC's absolutism works anyway. The revolutionary masses of Russia were demanding something more--they specifically made a revolution to get away from the tyranny of the marketplace. Therefore there were sharp limits on how many market-type mechanisms the Bolsheviks could employ without undermining their basic legitimacy.

This would suggest that in order to reform, the Soviet Communists would have had to come up with different kinds of reforms. Many would suggest non-market reforms are a contradiction in terms, that only markets can be the basis of a functional economy. If that is true the Soviet Union was founded on faulty premises from the beginning.

I think no, they might possibly have found their way with workable non-market solutions, but I have to admit I don't have those solutions handy to offer!

I do think that no matter how they finessed it, adopting Deng-like "reforms" would lead directly and rapidly to the collapse of the legitimacy of the Communist regime, as OTL. Whether that is good or bad I can't be sure--I am sure enough that it clearly is not automatically and universally good for everyone.
 
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