WI: Things for better for Communism?

Jonjo

Banned
All of Germany is taken by the Soviets, all of Korea gets taken over by the Soviets and China is given full access to resources and technology by the USSR to become a powerful nation much earlier.. how does the Cold War progress?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
The Soviet Union still eventually collapses due to the economic effects of trying to maintain a command economy in the face of competition from a free market economy.
 
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Basically

The Soviet Union collapses at some stage, Communism as it was OTL just isnt a sustainable economic system capable of competing with more efficient capitalist systems, more so because of the impact of democracy on mitigating the effects of excess capitalism while the authoritarian nature of the state to maintain a communist system undermined positive scientific or economic reforms.

And adding all that territory to the USSR merely hastens that demise, the USSR was scraping the barrel economically to maintain control of its OTL gains, unlikely the US which was capable of giving out the Marshall plan.
 
The USSR is not necessarily a fundamentally doomed state, nor is it doomed to follow the same path as historically, especially with some of the conditions listed by the OP, which would likely mean no WWII as we know it to be.
 
The assumption that all communist states will automatically fail is a rather Marxesque one - historical inevitability, triumph of the chosen true system (in this case, liberal democracy) over the others, etc. Regardless of whether one wants to argue if the USSR or PRC or whoever is/was 'really' communist, I think we can probably agree that neither really pursued full communism, ie. the withering away of the state. So in the Soviet context, communism was just a fancy new gloss on a statist, authoritarian society where the government controls everything and dictates who gets what. It's not an innovation, and similar regimes under different names have lasted a long time, and indeed, the collapse of the USSR took most people, even 'Kremlin-watchers,' quite by surprise. With the additional resources posited by the OP and better management, the USSR could easily still be around today. And then, of course, there's the China route, but I don't know if that would be considered communism.
 
The communist system was an extremely bad one, but that does not mean that it will "collapse" within the same time span as OTL. It might very well celebrate its hundredth anniversary in 2017, though the people who have to endure that system will not be happy about it.

I am asking the same question as in comparable threads about a victorious Nazi Germany: what does "collapse" mean when applied to a political system?
Being occupied by a foreign power, coup d' etat, revolution - peaceful or violent -, reform from above - or just creaking on for decade and decade?
The possibility mentioned last is not at all that unlikely, given the experience with North Korea.
 
The assumption that all communist states will automatically fail is a rather Marxesque one - historical inevitability, triumph of the chosen true system (in this case, liberal democracy) over the others, etc. Regardless of whether one wants to argue if the USSR or PRC or whoever is/was 'really' communist, I think we can probably agree that neither really pursued full communism, ie. the withering away of the state. So in the Soviet context, communism was just a fancy new gloss on a statist, authoritarian society where the government controls everything and dictates who gets what. It's not an innovation, and similar regimes under different names have lasted a long time, and indeed, the collapse of the USSR took most people, even 'Kremlin-watchers,' quite by surprise. With the additional resources posited by the OP and better management, the USSR could easily still be around today. And then, of course, there's the China route, but I don't know if that would be considered communism.

Indeed, I find it funny that people who think the U.S.S.R was always doomed have a Marxist viw of history.:p

Whatever the fate of central planning or the CPSU's stranglehold on power. The fal of the U.S.S.R was a very unlikly & shocking event to peopl old enougth to remember it.


The best way to have a better outcome for the U.S.S.R. Is to forget post-WW2 POD's and just butterfly Stalin's ris to power. That'd save the U.S.S.R a metric f**k-ton of trouble.

Failing that have Hitler get a bloody nose fighting France, such as the Ardennes offensive getting bogged-down. That saves everyone a lot of grief.


I am asking the same question as in comparable threads about a victorious Nazi Germany: what does "collapse" mean when applied to a political system?
Being occupied by a foreign power, coup d' etat, revolution - peaceful or violent -, reform from above - or just creaking on for decade and decade?
The possibility mentioned last is not at all that unlikely, given the experience with North Korea.

The main thing is Nazism & Marxism-Leninism are not comparable. Nazism was commited utterly to hatred, violence and territorial conquest unto self-destruion. Plus the regime was built around Hitler, hell to all intents and purposes it was Hitler.

As for North Korea, howevr crazy it might be th Kim rgime has never commited itself to annexing an inch of non-Korean territory. Hitler OTOH wanted to conque/domanate Eurasia at the very least.
 
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