WI: Dubček's reforms and thus Prague Spring do not occur?

Let's say Novotný was a bit more far-sighted than IRL: he initiates some minor economic, cultural and political reforms and by the end of 1967 agrees to share power with a protégé (probably Jozef Lenárt or some such), holding onto the increasingly ceremonial title of President of the Republic. The intelligentsia is still irate but, whatever it's going to do in the future, its discontent is not going to rise at a fever pitch in 1967-68.

How much is history changed?

I can think of two things:

  1. The USSR's relations with the West European communist parties are better than IRL; Eurocommunism will still exist but the impetus caused by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia won't be there.
  2. China and Albania will, at least for a few more years, not denounce the USSR as a fascist state (and Albania will not de jure exit the Warsaw Treaty, which it had been excluded from de facto since 1961 and left in 1968 IRL due to Prague Spring.)
But what else will change?
 
Here's a bit of irony for you- things going swimmingly in CS might have allowed the wave of Soviet reform that IOTL triggered the glasnost-perestroika push in the 1980's to occur in the early 1970's.

Bypassing the Brezhnev era would've had myriad good effects for Soviet economic and intellectual productivity.
How much reform actually gets done when oil prices (and Soviet profits from selling it) skyrocket after the 1973 embargo is an exercise for fellow AH-ers to ponder. If they plowed the profits from that into modernizing and rationalizing agriculture and industries, the shocks of the glasnost era would be buffered considerably.

Another bit to ponder is that this confident USSR might go a bit further with detente and try for more substantial cultural and trade links with the West.
 
Here's a bit of irony for you- things going swimmingly in CS might have allowed the wave of Soviet reform that IOTL triggered the glasnost-perestroika push in the 1980's to occur in the early 1970's.

Bypassing the Brezhnev era would've had myriad good effects for Soviet economic and intellectual productivity.
I don't see how this would happen. Glasnost and Perestroika were brought on by economic stagnation, which hit in the 70's.
 
I think he's referring to how "Socialism with a Human Face" was a reformist movement. That the Soviets cracked down on the Prague Spring reflects the reluctance of the Soviet leadership in accepting anything in the WP that wasn't orthodox Soviet-Communist dogma. Without them being so hidebound, the system could've been reformed.
 
I'm by no means a Sovietist scholar but my rough impression is that a lot of Soviet reforms on the drawing board in the latter 1960's got crushed in reaction to the Czech Spring.
Glasnost and perestroika were right out of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization playbook
Brezhnev froze things in amber and economic stagnation set in when the Soviets got the bonanza from oil profits after the '73 oil embargo making attempts at reforming the economy seem meaningless until the price of oil crashed ca 1980 thanks to Iran and Iraq selling everything they could dump on the global market.
Suddenly- there's no foreign exchange or extra cash to retool factories or upgrade agriculture or whatever. Afghanistan's drain on resources made it clearer how broke the Soviet state really was.

The problems in the Soviet economy (imbalance between heavy industry and light industry, abysmal civilian transport network, inefficiency, no quality control, defense sector absorbing way too much R&D) existed in 1965 and didn't improve in the interim.
The problem with Gorby's initiatives is they were too little, too late.
What could've done some good in 1970 was horribly inadequate in 1985.

To get back to the OP, I'm arguing that Dubcek himself had the right ideas but the Soviets weren't ready to be challenged that way. People criticizing the crushing of the Czech Spring were right to see it as Soviet repression.
The Soviets feared change and tried like heck to keep it from happening for nearly twenty years which doomed the Soviet state long-term.
If the Soviet leadership weren't so spastic in their response to reform during the 1960's, it could've had positive effects at home and abroad. YMMV
 
Glasnost and perestroika were right out of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization playbook
No they weren't. In the Khrushchev-era USSR artists still got in trouble for not painting socialist-realist works, historians still had to toe the party line, media was still heavily censored, the role of the party itself was actually strengthened (in the late 40's and early 50's state offices were attaining greater prominence and Beria was trying to exert independent authority as NKVD head), and attacking Communism was still a very bad thing to do if one didn't want to be arrested.

There was liberalization and and there were economic reforms, but otherwise the only connection between Khrushchev and Gorby is that the latter felt the former had stopped halfway.

Under Brezhnev there was a greater emphasis on managerial competence and technocratic solutions to economic problems. The Eastern Bloc states always had more market mechanisms in their economies than the USSR proper, hence the GDR's "consumer socialism," Hungary's "goulash communism," 80% of agriculture in private hands in Poland, etc. Andropov called for the Soviets to study the economies of these states, which were still significantly different from what Gorbachev proposed.
 
Top