Was there a way to avoid Brezhnev and continue the Khrushchev reforms?

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Deleted member 1487

It seems like during the Khrushchev period the Soviet economy reached a new period of vibrancy and development that was then crushed with the Brezhnev coup and recentralization of the economy during the "Kosygin Reforms", seeming to lead directly to the stagnation that would bring down the USSR. I know that is a heavy oversimplification of what happened, but for the sake of brevity in layout of this what if, let's go with that for now. So is there a way that Khrushchev could have continued in power and fought off Brezhnev, continuing to introduce market reforms and prevent the stagnation of the economy that started in the 1960s?
 
It seems like during the Khrushchev period the Soviet economy reached a new period of vibrancy and development that was then crushed with the Brezhnev coup and recentralization of the economy during the "Kosygin Reforms", seeming to lead directly to the stagnation that would bring down the USSR. I know that is a heavy oversimplification of what happened, but for the sake of brevity in layout of this what if, let's go with that for now. So is there a way that Khrushchev could have continued in power and fought off Brezhnev, continuing to introduce market reforms and prevent the stagnation of the economy that started in the 1960s?

Avoid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Why the rush? Play nice with the imperialist running dogs of capitalism till the next generation of ICBMs are ready in 1965.

The Red Star has lived under the Atomic Shadow of SAC since the '50s, what's a few more years?

So lose some of the bellicosity since the Cuban Revolution and just take it easy. Worldwide Marxism is best played as a long game, not gambits and PR stunts.
 
Avoid the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Or win it. Build up the forces involved and then publicly announce the deployment to the world whilst directly linking them to similar American actions. With the weapons already there it renders the quarantine/blockade moot, and IIRC Kennedy said that he wouldn't have launched a ground invasion or air strikes. A few years down the line when storable hypergolic fuelled ICBMs start becoming operational from silos you can even trade the Cuba-based forces away for concessions elsewhere.
 
You'd basically need a Khrushchiöv without Khrushchiöv. In other words, while his intentions were noble and good within the Soviet context, it was his abrasive personality and his combativeness which caused a lot of problems. He was, in effect (and apologies in advance), the Donald Trump of the Soviet Union. Had you put any other reformist in charge from the beginning after Stalin died, the Soviet Union would have been OK with reform, even if Gosplan is dragged kicking and screaming. Then and only then could Brezhnev have been avoided completely.
 
nd IIRC Kennedy said that he wouldn't have launched a ground invasion or air strikes.

But that may not have stopped General Power from 'accidentally' starting WWIII on his own.
He had predelegated command authority for SAC. And was not entirely sane. He's who 'Jack D. Ripper' was based on for _Dr. Strangelove_

Or a 'Seven Days in May' coup. Doing nothing, or giving in after the U2 'see' the incoming crates, the World was on a razor's edge, and neither JFK or Khrushchev really realized it at first.

I still wonder of the luck to this day, how I, and the rest of the US personnel in West Germany, wasn't vaporized that October. Along with the rest of Europe and Asia.
 
You'd basically need a Khrushchiöv without Khrushchiöv. In other words, while his intentions were noble and good within the Soviet context, it was his abrasive personality and his combativeness which caused a lot of problems. He was, in effect (and apologies in advance), the Donald Trump of the Soviet Union. Had you put any other reformist in charge from the beginning after Stalin died, the Soviet Union would have been OK with reform, even if Gosplan is dragged kicking and screaming. Then and only then could Brezhnev have been avoided completely.

He was not Trump at all: Trump, like it or not, has a huge business experience but little of “party” experience. OTOH, Nikita always was strictly a Party figure with close to zero exposure to how (Soviet) economics is functioning. So he was jumping to “looking good” ideas without understanding of the underlying problems and potential consequences. He did well with mass housing projects (but the side effect was a mass exodus of the young people from the rural areas) but his ideas regarding extensive rather than intensive agriculture methods proved to be an expensive failure. His idea of cutting bureaucracy sounded good but it’s implementation, sovnarkhozes, produced confusion and increase of the bureaucratic apparatus. His most ridiculed idea about “introducing” corn (as if it was not already growing in the SU) resulted in the attempts to grow it everywhere regardless climate and soil (in the Central Russia it was growing knee high), etc.
 

hammo1j

Donor
Perhaps if the reforms in Eastern Europe weren't crushed in 1956, then they might spread Eastwards.

It might have been possible to have economic reforms without political reforms as China demonstrates. I assume that's what Gorbachev was trying in the late 80's.

Not sure how China squares itself to living up to the original tenets of communism though...
 
Perhaps if the reforms in Eastern Europe weren't crushed in 1956, then they might spread Eastwards.

It might have been possible to have economic reforms without political reforms as China demonstrates. I assume that's what Gorbachev was trying in the late 80's.

Not sure how China squares itself to living up to the original tenets of communism though...

Well, China got huge investments from the West both financial and technological to a great degree because it was considered a “counterweight” to the SU. Why would the same happened to the SU of the 1960s or even 1980s?

Then, of course, it seems that Chinese leadership after Mao proved to be more ideologically flexible in the terms of allowing capitalism within socialism and, I suspect that after the failures of Mao economic experiments they were not as far into the “socialist style economy” as the SU was, which means that the changes had been easier (and anyway their population had few decades less of an intensive brainwashing).
 
Avoid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

With regard to people saying Khrushchev would stay in power without the Cuban Missile Crisis, this is very questionable. Ian D. Thatcher lists the reasons Khrushchev's successors gave for his ouster:

"The anti-Khrushchev charges included policy failures, domestic and foreign. At home industry and agriculture were under-performing. Abroad relations had soured with China. Most importantly, these policy failings were linked to Khrushchev's misdemeanours as leader. Khrushchev, it was claimed, was bypassing the Presidium and the Central Committee. He had taken to issuing decrees in the name of the Central Committee that were in fact on his own initiative. Khrushchev had surrounded himself with sycophants and family members that formed his inner-staff. Presidium colleagues could not reach him directly but had to deal with this entourage. Khrushchev simply ignored the advice of the Politburo, assigning key duties to his private circle outside the control of the party elite. In this sense Khrushchev broke party norms and even engaged in corruption. The award of honours to his son and son-in-law was noted, as well as the use of state money to fund family excursions abroad on what was supposed to be official business.

"Such irregularities, it was said, occurred because Khrushchev had concentrated power in his own hands. Moreover, he did not know how to use this power sensibly. While having little or no expertise, he considered himself an expert in agriculture, diplomacy, science, and art, and his interfering had devastating consequences. Khrushchev defended the quack geneticist Lysenko, for example, despite warnings from eminent scientists. Khrushchev was unable to control his thoughts and most importantly his mouth. He had upset prominent friends within the socialist camp, causing trouble in relations with China, Albania, Romania, and Poland. Khrushchev would make promises to foreign heads of state for which he had not received the required authority from the Presidium or Central Committee. In the USSR Khrushchev had engaged in constant reorganisations of economic and party bodies that brought only additional confusion and threatened to split the party. Yet, paradoxically, this sad story of failure and illegality was accompanied by excessive praise of Khrushchev in the media. Ignored and often insulted by the man who had turned meetings of the Presidium into 'empty formality', Khrushchev's colleagues had to act. Khrushchev's 'petty tyranny' unlike Stalin's was not based on terror, but this did not excuse it. If anything, it was 'harder to struggle with a living cult than with a dead one. If Stalin destroyed people physically, Khrushchev destroyed them morally'.

"This indictment against Khrushchev was a clever use of his own denunciation of the 'cult of personality' against Stalin. (It also borrowed from the criticism, made by Stalin much earlier, that Khrushchev was guilty of 'hare-brained' schemes!) Khrushchev now found himself portrayed as a leader out of touch with reality, as making a mess of policy, and as flouting party rules, ignoring and belittling comrades, whilst surviving in an artificial bubble of excessive praise from official propaganda and an inner coterie of toadies..." https://history-groby.weebly.com/uploads/2/9/5/6/29562653/khruschev_and_stalin_1.pdf

Thatcher feels that this indictment is largely unfair, but it is the one that Khrushchev's successors made in justifying his ouster, and note that the Cuban Missile Crisis is not even mentioned (at least explicitly)...
 

Deleted member 1487

Well, China got huge investments from the West both financial and technological to a great degree because it was considered a “counterweight” to the SU. Why would the same happened to the SU of the 1960s or even 1980s?

Then, of course, it seems that Chinese leadership after Mao proved to be more ideologically flexible in the terms of allowing capitalism within socialism and, I suspect that after the failures of Mao economic experiments they were not as far into the “socialist style economy” as the SU was, which means that the changes had been easier (and anyway their population had few decades less of an intensive brainwashing).
China's investments from the west came after they opened up to US corporations; they also demanded technology transfers as part of the deal. It took Mao dying and new leadership to reform the economy before anything substantial happened to improve the Chinese economy:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf

So the USSR didn't need US inputs to improve their situation, the 1950s apparently saw much greater growth than ever recovery from WW2 would have indicated as a result of post-Stalin reforms and liberalizing of the economy, which gradually stopped under Brezhnev:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594504

Not that Khrushchev was without flaws and fault as you pointed out earlier, but stagnation seems to really have been as much a retrenchment of the hardliners in the Brezhnev era who refused to adapt to the changing global and domestic economic situation that doomed the USSR.
 
China's investments from the west came after they opened up to US corporations; they also demanded technology transfers as part of the deal. It took Mao dying and new leadership to reform the economy before anything substantial happened to improve the Chinese economy:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf

So the USSR didn't need US inputs to improve their situation, the 1950s apparently saw much greater growth than ever recovery from WW2 would have indicated as a result of post-Stalin reforms and liberalizing of the economy, which gradually stopped under Brezhnev:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594504

Not that Khrushchev was without flaws and fault as you pointed out earlier, but stagnation seems to really have been as much a retrenchment of the hardliners in the Brezhnev era who refused to adapt to the changing global and domestic economic situation that doomed the USSR.
While I have some doubts about the Soviet and Chinese economies, I completely agree about Breznev’s part: it was “do not make waves” ideology all over. I would not say that the changing economic situation and technological progress had been ignored but they were addressed within the existing framework with the predictable results.
 

Deleted member 1487

I would not say that the changing economic situation and technological progress had been ignored but they were addressed within the existing framework with the predictable results.
Perhaps I should have phrased it differently, like that they weren't willing to adapt the system to the changing situation.
 

longsword14

Banned
2 would have indicated as a result of post-Stalin reforms and liberalizing of the economy, which gradually stopped under Brezhnev:
Law of diminishing returns. The flattening of the growth curve has little to do with Brezhnev or Khruschev and a lot to do with Soviet inability to evolve their industry in most areas. Once the inputs stop increasing, so do the outputs.
 
Law of diminishing returns. The flattening of the growth curve has little to do with Brezhnev or Khruschev and a lot to do with Soviet inability to evolve their industry in most areas. Once the inputs stop increasing, so do the outputs.
Indeed. Plus let’s not forget that the Soviet economy had been built based upon the untested theories which pretty much denied all known facts about the markets, personal and collective stimulus, competition etc. All of them had been replaced with (a) centralized planning from top to bottom which could not be adequately done in the country of that size, (b) concentration on production of the means of production at the expense of the consumer goods and (c) replacement of the ...er... natural human interests (like living comfortably) with an ideology explicitly denying these interests. It is rather surprising that the system survived that long.
 
Isn't that what they were trying to do? It just didn't work.

With the government having a complete control over information, there was no need in the whole messy situation. In that sense Brezhnev’s regime was much more skillful: things had been happening without people knowing about them unless there was some tangible success.
 
Avoid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Why the rush? Play nice with the imperialist running dogs of capitalism till the next generation of ICBMs are ready in 1965.

The Red Star has lived under the Atomic Shadow of SAC since the '50s, what's a few more years?

So lose some of the bellicosity since the Cuban Revolution and just take it easy. Worldwide Marxism is best played as a long game, not gambits and PR stunts.

I think it’s before that. Avoid Powers’s U-2 shootdown and have the Four Powers Summit go off as intended.
 
All one-party states tend to be corrupt, since there are no checks and balances or any reason to have any oversight. So the idea that Kh and his family were corrupt were just politically expedient and easily palatable horseshit excuses to displace him, especially considering that Brezhnev family, with especially his monster of a daughter, were hundred-fold more corrupt than anything Kh did with his brood. The problems were:

1. By decentralizing the industry and giving more "power" to the locales, he in effect sent hordes of Moscow officials in charge of planning and industry into exile by having them leave the comfort of Moscow and all that entailed and had them go to into the provinces to supervise from there. In the 1950s, the drop from creature comforts of a city like Moscow to a town in the middle of the Urals was steep indeed, and we're now talking thousands of disgruntled officials and their wives. And all this done without consulting or even discussing. In a one-party tyranny, the bureaucrats cannot protest of course, but they can screw-up accidentally on-purpose. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment has seen the power of someone being able to gum up the works through "legal" means if they are disgruntled.

2. Decentralization caused lines of communication to be confused, causing chaos and eroding the power of the ministries that were initially rather supportive partners of Kh in terms of his "coalition."

3. No blood-letting of the anti-Kh members. In a one-party tyranny, fear counts for a lot. During the first anti-Kh putsch, when Malenkov and Molotov make their move with half of the Central Committee out of town, Kh demanded a full Central Commitee vote, and M&M agreed, thinking they had the majority. They didn't. Kh had the Soviet Air Force fly in the pro-Kh Central Committee members and Kh won the day and expelled the troublemakers, but did not have them arrested or executed. Merely demoted. It meant that when Brezhnev and his pals were gathering for a coup, they knew their price of failure was not a bullet in the back of the head, but being made factory manager in Magnitogorsk. The instruments of fear were removed by Kh and he could no longer apply them or have people fear them.

4. Reduction of the Soviet Army. All armies have bloat, but none were as bloated as the Soviet Army in the 1960s. The issue wasn't soldiers, who were a conscript force just passing through and who soldiered for a few years and then were made into "productive" members of society, churning out sprockets at Lenin Works Factory Eleventy when they'd get demobilizing. The issue was the officer class, for all those infantry and artillery regiments. From the point of view of the state, a horde of people who had to be fed and clothed and whose families likewise had to be billeted and taken care of for ever and ever, and who were not "productive" and who upon retiring early would then just sit on a pension and not do anything. The issue was so serious that there were rules restricting which towns were allowed for officers to retire in, because there was a fear these un-productive members of society would take up too much space in the "good" towns and displace productive members of it, leading to a drain on the resources there. But hey, thank goodness for innovations, because here come rockets, right? And rockets are cheaper than a horde of regimental officers and regiments of soldiers as well! But, uh, reducing the army to save money, and the victorious Red Army which Won the War is not good politics. Also, the first time around, it was the Air Force who bailed out Kh during the Molotov putsch. He was biting the hand that fed him, even if he was doing it for sound economic reasons.

5. Virgin Lands fiasco. Kh had a plan. Well, he had a lot of plans. But he was the "agriculture" guy so naturally he had an agricultural plan. Virgin Lands out in the East, which would be colonized and farmed and harvested and be awesome. The problem of course is that most of the Soviet Union is drought-heavy as compared to the rest of Eastern Europe, never mind good soil of Western Europe. 1 in 10 years in the Soviet Union, on average, were drought years. In the Virgin Lands, it was one in seven, a bit better. But in comparison, IIRC, in Poland, it is 1 in 100. So the chance of failure was much higher and it hit. 1963 was a harvest failure year. A public slap in the face from Mother Nature to Kh and his agricultural policies. Also, the Colonization of the Virgin Lands was a massive undertaking, and the amount of resources devoted to it - bearing no yield - was costly in money and prestige.

6. 1962 Party reforms. Kh hit upon the novel idea of getting "fresh blood" into the Party by having a third of the party committees replaced every one to two years. This of course pisses off the regional secretaries who now lose patronage. If one third of the jobs are up for grabs every couple of years via even horseshit elections, then you cannot guarantee the jobs for your cronies to be set for life, which goes at the very heart of the bureaucratic regime.

7. 1962 Party reforms, part two. Kh wanted to split committees and specialize them. He particularly like the notion of having agricultural committees and industrial committees be separate. And this of course caused bloody chaos for two reasons. First of all, which of the committees will be in charge of police? Who will run education? What about health? All these things have budgets. So it's not just the question of responsibility, it's a question of power, money and patronage. Also, this brought the hermit and secular-Soviet monk-saint Suslov out of his one-bedroom tiny apartment full of books of Marx and Lenin and blink at the sunlight and wag his bony finger at Kh and rally the faithful. By splitting the committee, is not Comrade Kh now advocating a split in the very Party itself? Is he not advocating the division of Industrial Party and Peasant Party? He is spitting on Lenin! Suslov was widely admired and respected as a true-believer. For Suslov to speak out against a Soviet leader, was like for a Cardinal to call for the downfall of a corrupt Pope. And it gave gravitas to the band gathering to remove Kh.

Kh was Kh, so his high-handed manner and abrasive personality were not going to change. Neither were his family obligations. And agriculture will defeat anyone in the Soviet Union if they hang around long enough, due to drought and shitty Soviet economy and piss-poor planning of a one-party tyranny. But alienating the Army and the Party could have been avoided, as could have shifting all those bureaucrats around, maybe. But this would have drained the economy.
 
What if makoyain got the big seat? As an Armenian, he understood the cruelty and inaffency of mass murder.
He would probably take a gentler hand, titoist workers councils profit sharing here we go.
 
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