What if the Cold war never ended?

You would be surprised. The Arab Spring was coordinated primarily via the Internet, and brought down a number of governments throughout the Middle East. Who's to say a similar "spring" wouldn't eventually occur in, say, Central Asia? The Baltics?
speaking about the Arab spring, That would be incrediblly interesting ITTL, with both sides trying to push their influence in the middle east, It could turn into another cold war battleground with both the USA and the Communists pushing diffrent groups among the protestors or supporting the regimes. that would be very interesting to say the least.
 
The economic rot and corruption endemic in the USSR by the mid 80s was so pervasive that it's really hard to get it to survive past the 1990s. The decline in the price of oil in the late 90s would have been almost impossible for them to overcome. So, you need a POD and subsequent changes that, frankly, are big enough to allow your imagination to take it just about wherever you want.

As others have suggested, the internet would be difficult for them to manage. The Chinese have thrived because they backed off the ideology to a degree the Soviets never fully did and created an economic hybrid that has allowed their quality of life to continually improve, something that ceased to happen for the Soviet populace following the mid 1970s.
 
The economic rot and corruption endemic in the USSR by the mid 80s was so pervasive that it's really hard to get it to survive past the 1990s. The decline in the price of oil in the late 90s would have been almost impossible for them to overcome. So, you need a POD and subsequent changes that, frankly, are big enough to allow your imagination to take it just about wherever you want.

As others have suggested, the internet would be difficult for them to manage. The Chinese have thrived because they backed off the ideology to a degree the Soviets never fully did and created an economic hybrid that has allowed their quality of life to continually improve, something that ceased to happen for the Soviet populace following the mid 1970s.

By this logic the Yeltsin-era Russian Federation (which was much weaker economically and more corrupt than even the late period USSR) would have collapsed in the late 90s, but it didn't.
 
By this logic the Yeltsin-era Russian Federation (which was much weaker economically and more corrupt than even the late period USSR) would have collapsed in the late 90s, but it didn't.

Are you familiar with the Russian debt crisis in 1998? I dont think the USSR survives that.
 
Because...
Different circumstances. The Russian Federation, for example, didn't have an entire bloc of nations trying to subvert it and ensure its failure at every turn. While corrupt, the Federation also wasn't actively trying to suppress dissidents. The Internet doesn't present the same challenge to open democracies.
 
Let's assume that USSR somehow magically stabilizing and reforming yourself.
As result-Surviving throughout nineties to TTL 2018.
How the world will look like?
UPD: Tip - Berlin wall never fell.

The only way to get this done is to get the Soviet Union to reform its economy early on, which is difficult but not impossible. Four years ago I wrote a timeline that culminated in the survival of the USSR, starting with Kosygin taking power. It ultimately ended with the White House and the Kremlin both becoming victims of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and cooperating against it to a degree up to 2013 (it ends there since I wrote it in that year).
 
There are plenty of ways to achieve this, including some PODs in the 1980's (namely Andropov living longer to implement his reforms, my personal pick).

And frankly there are many ways a continued Cold War could effect the world by 2018; for one the arms race would still exist and that both militaries would be investing into various technologies and strategies to counter each other (and that proxy wars would still exist). That and the threat of communism being relevant instead of mostly just a yesteryear thing, especially with groups like the Red Army Faction possibly still a threat as of TTL's 2018.
 
Are you familiar with the Russian debt crisis in 1998? I dont think the USSR survives that.

Which could easily be avoided with an early 80s or earlier POD.

Different circumstances. The Russian Federation, for example, didn't have an entire bloc of nations trying to subvert it and ensure its failure at every turn. While corrupt, the Federation also wasn't actively trying to suppress dissidents. The Internet doesn't present the same challenge to open democracies.

So this doesn't count as suppressing dissidents apparently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/03/russia.nickpatonwalsh

Yet 10 years after the bloodshed, in which at least 123 people were killed, Russia is exploding the myth that the crackdown was anything other than a putsch against Mr Yeltsin's political opponents.

The unrest was sparked by his decision in late September to dissolve a parliament increasingly opposed to his economic reforms. He also scrapped the constitution, replacing it with another that gave him near-monarchic executive powers.
 
Which could easily be avoided with an early 80s or earlier POD.

Avoided. Yes. Easily? No.

Their economy and in particular, foreign currency reserves, are and were heavily dependent upon oil revenues and the price of oil collapsed following the Asian crisis. You need to lessen their economy's dependence on oil revenues. To do this requires PODs that, as I said in my original comment, sufficiently change things such that you can basically let your imagination run wild.
 
How would the superpowers react to the growing evidence of anthropogenic climate change? Would the continuing Cold War make the world care even less about fixing the environment? You know, along the lines of "well, that's certainly bad but it would be even worse if those other guys get the upper hand, so crank up those oil wells and drill, baby, drill".
 
There are plenty of ways to achieve this, including some PODs in the 1980's (namely Andropov living longer to implement his reforms, my personal pick).

And frankly there are many ways a continued Cold War could effect the world by 2018; for one the arms race would still exist and that both militaries would be investing into various technologies and strategies to counter each other (and that proxy wars would still exist). That and the threat of communism being relevant instead of mostly just a yesteryear thing, especially with groups like the Red Army Faction possibly still a threat as of TTL's 2018.

I dont think Andropov could do it. Too late and his ideas for reforms were insufficient. Even if you are able to rein in corruption he lacked the boldness to implement necessary economic reforms. And it would have taken too long to accumulate the power necessary to implement reforms that would have by definition hurt some of his potential rivals such as Victor Grishin or Grigori Romanov.

The only way to get this done is to get the Soviet Union to reform its economy early on, which is difficult but not impossible. Four years ago I wrote a timeline that culminated in the survival of the USSR, starting with Kosygin taking power. It ultimately ended with the White House and the Kremlin both becoming victims of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and cooperating against it to a degree up to 2013 (it ends there since I wrote it in that year).

I enjoyed your timeline but disagreed with the premise that Kosygin could do it.

It's really, really hard for the USSR to continue with a POD post 1970, 1975 at the latest. If you want a later POD, I think your best bet is to keep oil prices high for a longer period of time while simultaneously cutting military spending. But the military was so integrated into the economy that I am not sure that's viable. Staying out of Afghanistan would help too.

Honestly, I think the USSR was fatally flawed once Stalin consolidated power. Everyone with a brain or courage was dead and the survivors traumatized.
 
I enjoyed your timeline but disagreed with the premise that Kosygin could do it.

Why did you disagree with that premise?

It's really, really hard for the USSR to continue with a POD post 1970, 1975 at the latest. If you want a later POD, I think your best bet is to keep oil prices high for a longer period of time while simultaneously cutting military spending. But the military was so integrated into the economy that I am not sure that's viable. Staying out of Afghanistan would help too.

Agreed, but my PoD is in 1968, ergo pre 1970 ;).

Honestly, I think the USSR was fatally flawed once Stalin consolidated power. Everyone with a brain or courage was dead and the survivors traumatized.

Flawes yes, doomed no. If all else fails the USSR could continue as a giant North Korea, though that's not preferable. Not just in this matter but in general I'd like to emphasize that nothing is inevitable until it happens.
 
Flawes yes, doomed no. If all else fails the USSR could continue as a giant North Korea, though that's not preferable. Not just in this matter but in general I'd like to emphasize that nothing is inevitable until it happens.

The USSR is more likely to go full on Yugoslavia with a chaotic civil war between hardliners, reformists, and various third party anti-Soviet groups and so fourth. (Add in NATO and China sending troops into the burning Motherland and airstrikes to take out nuke sites.)

Cue Moscow, Stalingrad, and Leningrad going up in atomic fire.
 
Why did you disagree with that premise?



Agreed, but my PoD is in 1968, ergo pre 1970 ;).



Flawes yes, doomed no. If all else fails the USSR could continue as a giant North Korea, though that's not preferable. Not just in this matter but in general I'd like to emphasize that nothing is inevitable until it happens.

Well, a few things. First, I think Kosygin gets overrated a bit. Even if you believe his reforms would have been sufficient, accumulating the power necessary to implement would have been difficult. It's noteworthy that the two guys who accumulated the most power, Stalin and Brezhnev, were masters at playing the system. Kosygin, almost by definition, wasnt. And with reforms there are always losers, often the biggest in the highest places of power.

Second, I'm a big believer of the resource curse both in general and specific to the Soviet Union. The discovery of oil in Western Siberia and the subsequent cash it provided made it too easy to postpone reforms or convince one that they were not necessary. It's like a trust fund for a rich kid that never learned financial discipline or like professional athletes.

Finally, the apparatchik was not likely to reform itself enough to achieve the success required. People and institutions dont change that quickly unless you put a gun to their head like Stalin did or destroy their old system like post WWII Germany and Japan. And as I said earlier, there's reason to believe the bold intelligent types necessary to do this died in 1938.

I do enjoy your writing immensely though. And while I disagree with the repercussions of your POD, it was close enough to reality that I could suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it as a very nice piece of fiction.
 
The USSR is more likely to go full on Yugoslavia with a chaotic civil war between hardliners, reformists, and various third party anti-Soviet groups and so fourth. (Add in NATO and China sending troops into the burning Motherland and airstrikes to take out nuke sites.)

Cue Moscow, Stalingrad, and Leningrad going up in atomic fire.

What a coincidence: I wrote a TL on that topic too. Beyond that, why can't you "the Soviet Union is doomed" crowd ever come up with a PoD to save it? As I've mentioned before, nothing is inevitable until it happens. Why is "everything going right" for the USSR so ASB while OTL occurences like Hitler's totally lucky moves are "normal"?
 
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The thing is that even people opposed to the establishment in the USSR were not opposed to the USSR itself, necessarily. It was simply the fact that it was a bunch of old (and increasingly very old) Stalinists running the government and enforcing a hardline on everything. By the 1980s, those men were very, very old. Andropov was essentially a leader in a hospital bed and a respirator even before he died. So there is something to the idea of reforming the apparatus rather than collapsing it outright.
 
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