WI: USSR achieves food autarky in 1950s?

I would argue that, while Lysenko did a lot of damage to Soviet agriculture, he's a symptom of a larger problem. We need to look at why Stalin was so willing to accept Lysenko's ideas:

1. Lysenko promised huge gains relatively easily. The modern equivalent of Lysenkoism is those "one weird trick to..." banner ads. Expert opinion being against Lysenko didn't really hurt him because Stalin didn't trust the experts, and firmly believed that they were either unable to unwilling to make "brilliant" plans like Lysenko's.

2. Lysenko's ideas fit with Soviet ideology. Amongst other things Lysenko's ideas implied that Communism was natural, that Russian peasant wisdom was better than bourgeois science (there's anti-Semitic undertones here, because a lot of the scientists who opposed Lysenko were Jews), and that Mendelian genetics supported Nazi ideas like eugenics (and thus this was another way that the West was similar to the Nazis). All of these things reinforced the beliefs of Stalin and the Bolsheviks.

Had Lysenko died before he came to prominence some other snake oil salesman (or salesmen) probably would have emerged and played on the same flaws in Stalin's thinking. To fully get rid of Lysenko and his ilk would require major changes to how the Soviets handled science and agriculture.
 

Perkeo

Banned
Because most of it is cold and dry.

It is like a giant-size North Dakota. Only the weather is more variable, which leads to larger collapses of agricultural production during bad year.

And yes, there was some amazing soil in some areas of the USSR, but as a proportion of total land area, those good soils were a relatively small portion of the total land area.
Given the enormous absolute size of the total land area, I don’t see that’s an excuse.
If 90% of the USSR were an unfarmable desert, the remaining 10% would be enough for a modern agriculture.
The Soviet Unions resources were thus dilute and located in extremely inconvenient places, meaning more economic resources had to be devoted to things like transport and the extraction itself (for example to extract oil from beneath the hard permafrost).
The people of the USSR could:
  • Build the bomb
  • Build the hydrogen bomb before the US
  • Sent a man to space before the US
  • Be a feared enemy in four decades of Cold War
  • Last but not least: extract oil from beneath the hard permafrost.
I don’t see how a decent leadership of those obviously capable population shouldn’t be able to modernize its agriculture.
 
The USSR COULD modernize agriculture, even setting aside the colossal failure of collectivization. The problem was that the USSR could not modernize agriculture (more tractors and other farm machinery, more fertilizer etc) and do all the other things it was doing in the 1920s and 1930s. The massive increase in the develop of heavy industry, mammoth projects like the various canals, the Moscow subway etc. Sure lots of slave/prisoner labor was used but these projects and others sucked up resources. The only way they got tractors was by paying Ford to build and set up a tractor factory in Russia as a turn key operation. There were lots of reasons for this.

1. Communism needs proletarian workers, so you need factories as a priority not farmers, preferably things like steel.
2. Showpiece megaprojects were good for Stalin's ego and also "showed the world the triumphs of communism".
3. It was better to produce military vehicles and tanks than farm machinery to protect the revolution.

These are just a few of the reasons. Of course after WWII the was a legitimate need to expend a lot of effort on rebuilding infrastructure, factories etc. However now the need for the military was even greater as producing the weapons of the Cold War was much more expensive in rubles and materiel than the pre-war and WWII stuff. As long as the Kholkozniks could produce enough to feed the military and the urban protletariat, or any deficiencies could be purchased without too much difficulty on the open market (and with COMECON this meant Eastern European satellites were selling cheap to the USSR) that was adequate.

One thing about Lysenko, one reason his theories were so attractive is that they jibed with the theory about the "New Soviet Man". People brought up from the get-go in the communist society would be imbued with the proper attitude to make it work. The concept of genetic fluidity with proper external conditions in one generation fits with this nicely.
 
Given the enormous absolute size of the total land area, I don’t see that’s an excuse.
If 90% of the USSR were an unfarmable desert, the remaining 10% would be enough for a modern agriculture.

No matter how gigantic the USSR was, it was not infinitely large.

At some point, every country can reach a point where its population exceeds the resource output of that country's territory. For the wheat and livestock intensive agriculture the Soviets had chosen, their population had exceeded the resources of their territory in the 1970s.

I don’t see how a decent leadership of those obviously capable population shouldn’t be able to modernize its agriculture.

Sure they could modernize agriculture, most significantly they could improve efficiency enormously by reducing inputs, but modernization wouldn't change that they had hit the maxim output possible using the particular crops and overall system (that is, extensive farming in the American style) they'd chosen.

To feed more people, the Soviets would need to cull livestock, stop growing so much wheat, reduce the output of industrial crops (like cotton in central asia) and increase the amount of rye and potatoes they grew as well as introducing new crops like soya beans and quinoa (both of which would grow best in the same areas that grew wheat well and wouldn't yield much more than wheat per acre, but the proteins in both these crops would allow for much greater cuts to meat output).

However, to do the above the Soviets would need to change the diets of ordinary people and accept the "defeat" of recognizing that they cannot afford to feed their people like Britons.

Or they'd need to move away from extensive American style agriculture and build a whole lot of greenhouses and polytunnels to control the climates and produce more food but at higher costs.

You are seeing the results of a major economical change in Finnish agriculture as a result of EU membership and the disappearance of Soviet markets.
Few examples of this change: the number of cows, the rise and fall of Finnish pork industry, and the transfer towards the cultivation of broilers.

I suspect the fall in cow and pig numbers entirely explains how Finland was able to produce more plant crops. I am assuming that pre-1990, Finland used a similar system to elsewhere in Scandinavia, where both cows and pigs grazed/browsed in pastures while also having supplemental feed (like hay, swedes and turnips) provided to them?

Thus, while certainly far better suited for agriculture than spots like Arkhangelsk, Finland is geographically at a disadvantage when comparing the overall agricultural conditions prevailing in the majority parts of European USSR.

But what is relevant is comparing the quality of Finnish farmland (reindeer grazing lands in Lappland do not count) to the quality of Soviet farmland. Certainly, I know I'd rather farm in an arable-Finland-like climate than an arable-Ukraine-like climate.

@Karelian: Thanks for the very interesting links and graphs.

fasquardon
 
Last edited:
Crazy idea, but what if the Soviet Union tried to promote vegetarianism as a superior, possibly even proletarian, diet? It would give them an out for moving away from meat consumption.
 
I feel there's a potential satirical alternate history story there. The Communist bloc embraces vegetarianism so the capitalist West tries to maximise and valorise meat-consumption which ultimately results in them wrecking their economies and environments because of the inefficiencies and environmental impact involved which ultimately results in the US collapsing and the Soviets winning the Cold War.
 
Damn Hippie Commie Vegetarians!

Damn right! No man can call himself a real patriot if he doesn't at least eat chicken twice a day!

I feel there's a potential satirical alternate history story there. The Communist bloc embraces vegetarianism so the capitalist West tries to maximise and valorise meat-consumption which ultimately results in them wrecking their economies and environments because of the inefficiencies and environmental impact involved which ultimately results in the US collapsing and the Soviets winning the Cold War.

Well, to be sure they could wreck their environments raising too much livestock. And in the long-run, such a patriotic devotion to meat eating might cause the collapse of the US. I have difficulty seeing that happening before 2030 or so, though.

What I can see is the US demand for meat collapsing other countries by the alt-universe 2017 though.

And the Soviets would need more than vegetarianism to avoid collapse.

fasquardon
 
Build the hydrogen bomb before the US
No, they couldn't. The Ivy Mike test--the first American thermonuclear bomb--was in November 1952, which was followed by Castle Bravo--the first deliverable device--in March 1954. By contrast, the first Soviet hydrogen bomb test was RDS-37, in November 1955. That's over a year after the first American deliverable device, and three years after the first American thermonuclear bomb, period. Things look a little better if you include RDS-6s, the Sloika test, in August 1953, but Sloika wasn't really a thermonuclear bomb in the usual sense and everyone recognized that it was at best a stop-gap while they worked on RDS-37.
 
Things look a little better if you include RDS-6s, the Sloika test, in August 1953, but Sloika wasn't really a thermonuclear bomb in the usual sense and everyone recognized that it was at best a stop-gap while they worked on RDS-37.

If you do that, then you need to add in the earlier US boosted Fission designs
 
As I have posted I think the most important single factor, after giving due attention to the fact that Soviet climate makes for much more marginal farmland, is that the Bolsheviks as a hard-core industrial worker's party did not prioritize the countryside very highly, tending to think of agrarian as equals backward, old regime, inclined to bourgeois backsliding, and inconvenient generally. Their mistakes were in thinking that being more scientific would enable them to prevail easily (Sheldon Cooper's Tips on Farming!) and that they could shove the country people around as so many inert objects with no dire consequences. And indeed Stalin was generally able to pound hard enough with his fist to wring out sufficient food for the cities and hero projects. It just was a lot less than they hoped, between pre-Revolutionary yields and all their wonder science.

But these are interesting:
....
To feed more people, the Soviets would need to cull livestock, stop growing so much wheat, reduce the output of industrial crops (like cotton in central asia) and increase the amount of rye and potatoes they grew as well as introducing new crops like soya beans and quinoa (both of which would grow best in the same areas that grew wheat well and wouldn't yield much more than wheat per acre, but the proteins in both these crops would allow for much greater cuts to meat output).
...
Or they'd need to move away from extensive American style agriculture and build a whole lot of greenhouses and polytunnels to control the climates and produce more food but at higher costs...
fasquardon
That last thing in particular! One thing about Soviet urban development--once the despised and backward country people moved to the city, their status changed--and after all the vast majority of Soviet urban dwellers were first or at most second generation peasants. Before the war and revolution I believe many cities had proletarians whose ancestors had been there for some generations past, notably in Petersburg and Moscow, Kiev and the port cities. But these long timer proletarians tended to get shot up during the Civil War. The new Soviet man was in a sense a real thing; not in the genetic superman sense, almost a comic yet in my view admirable opposite--peasant with smarts and ambition rather. General Buck Turgidson could make fun of peasants who simply could not be expected to deal with a developed people's best tech in their best hands in Dr. Strangelove, but the fact is even in the movie they did a pretty good job--not quite perfect unfortunately, but good, and their inability to locate the lone bomber was precisely because they'd almost killed it before, so it went off course. This was the doing of people who perhaps started life as peasant children themselves, or if not, their fathers and mothers had. The USSR transformed them into more or less effectively city people and they studied aeronautical engineering or chemistry or geology. It's kind of beautiful I think.

But they were still peasants too, city or no city. The official food distribution system was not reliable enough, and as I believe I mentioned, they set up gardens right there in the city and this was much of their diet.

You can say it's ineconomic, but it is kind of Green anyway. The food is not being shipped in from halfway across the world, it is literally from their backyard. That's pretty good. I think it was sort of spiritually a good thing too, although I know enough about raising chickens and rabbits to see the dark side of it all.

Anyway, I'm not sure if the regime was embarrassed and preferred not to think about it, but supposing some leaders got the notion that a little bit of Green is actually quite Red, that making the industrial city simultaneously a Hanging Garden of Babylon is very Marxist. One embarrassing element was that people did a brisk business in selling their garden veggies--what if some Young Pioneer leader decides to turn it around and set the kid cadres loose making elaborate, greenhoused, lovingly attended and thoughtfully designed intense garden spaces? If they use waste heat from factory exhausts and UV lights to keep veggies growing in a Moscow winter? If the Gardening Pioneers of the 1930s grow up to be factory supervisors in the '50s and urban planners start greening up every space they can, designing in water pipes and drainage to compost heaps and they just generally go to town with it. Stay in town with it.

I can see some dangerous backfiring happening. Soviet industrial design was not very environmentally conscious, and there would be a lot of pollution, which garden plants might concentrate. Vice versa though it is a canary in the coal mine sort of thing; people will get sick, the hospitals might diagnose the problem, and maybe attention will turn to detecting and diverting pollutants. The better thing would be to go back to the factory and request they design some way to sequester the bad stuff; the plant manager may shrug and say "we have to meet the Plan, we don't have authorization to divert labor and materials like that!" but then what if the city Soviet comes back and says "Comrade, we authorize you, and here is our written request so that if you should fall short, you can show it to the Ministry of your Bureau!" If some major Party bigwig's signature is on it, this might be all the manager needs. Then the various cities with their various pollution control or remediation schemes get noted in various journals as heroes of Soviet progress and disseminated across the country so that the cities adopt each other's schemes and the net level of pollution drops, perhaps to below Western levels. Other things can go wrong such as wonder materials like translucent plastic sheeting for winter covering of gardens turns out to leach out nasty chemicals, but it is more of the same thing.

Meanwhile you have urban people keeping up and ramifying their garden skills, and young citizens from the biggest cities taking garden management as a matter of course; they might prove to be superior agrarian managers out in the countryside--make some of that Soviet wonder science a real thing with managers with hands-on garden experience recognizing things going environmentally wrong and having a good idea what might fix it.

I'm thinking of an ATL Mir with garden cupola modules packed full of diverse plants trial and error by the cosmonauts find work well in LEO with its 50-minute days and nights and zero G, jumpstarting closed ecology spacecraft; the cosmonauts need little training because they grew up doing this and it is something Soviet citizens routinely do with their off time.

Krushchev might be very much into it and maybe with the Soviet Veganism thing happening too, more of his agrarian schemes might work out better; maybe he is distracted from the Cuban missile plan and stays in power to 1970 or so.

With urban gardening a major thing, perhaps the regime's disdain for agrarian interests is softened and bridged over and by the 1980s the collectives are better integrated into wider Soviet society, albeit also less needed.

With enough labor turning to the gardening and other intensive resources--plastic sheets, power for lights and heaters, ample clean water and parallel brown water with central composting and urban bio-recycling; the labor comes from ordinary citizens gardening in their free time so it is a cheap resource, perhaps the cities can go beyond supplying flavor, nutritional supplement vitamins to supplying a substantial portion of the total calories they need right in the city, freeing up transport for other cargo than food.

Meat--keeping cattle or even goats in the city is not going to work so well, but keeping chickens and rabbits should work a lot better. Perhaps they don't eat so much red meat as their peasant ancestors did, but lots of chicken and rabbit or guinea pig meat, plenty for good nutrition supplemented by the quinoa and soy?

They can't export it except to hippies, but they can live well on a light investment by the State.
 
The choice for the Soviet leadership was to either have a working agricultural sector, or a Party that remained in power. To allow farmers that owned/controlled their farms would open up a can of worms - from higher food prices for the workers in the cities, higher standard of living in the countryside than in the cities, creation of a kulak class et cetera.

Classical communists (ie the europeans) hated farmers, agriculture and the countryside, that they worked very hard to replace with laborers, industry and cities. Farmers existed to produce food, that then was given to the workers without any payment.
 
Anyway, I'm not sure if the regime was embarrassed and preferred not to think about it,

So far as I know, no-one in East or West was considering that sort of urban development. Certainly in the Soviet Union, one has to overcome their ideas on progress. The Bolsheviks bought heavily into the ideas of progress that were fashionable in the early 20th Century (and indeed are STILL fashionable a century later) - they wanted to turn the USSR into an urbanized, technologically advanced state where food was grown and harvested with a minimum of human labour - basically, they wanted the country to be the USA with Socialism. So far as I am aware, the US was not designing garden cities in the 1920s.

Then there's the whole status thing. The founding Bolsheviks and many of the middle manager types and footsoldiers were urbanites (whether old or new, it didn't matter) who looked down on the rural bumpkins. I suspect that forcing people to garden like peasants might cause some discontent among this politically important constituency.

but supposing some leaders got the notion that a little bit of Green is actually quite Red, that making the industrial city simultaneously a Hanging Garden of Babylon is very Marxist. One embarrassing element was that people did a brisk business in selling their garden veggies--what if some Young Pioneer leader decides to turn it around and set the kid cadres loose making elaborate, greenhoused, lovingly attended and thoughtfully designed intense garden spaces? If they use waste heat from factory exhausts and UV lights to keep veggies growing in a Moscow winter? If the Gardening Pioneers of the 1930s grow up to be factory supervisors in the '50s and urban planners start greening up every space they can, designing in water pipes and drainage to compost heaps and they just generally go to town with it. Stay in town with it.

I wonder if such a commitment to urban gardening could come out of a Russian Revolution that was won by the Left SRs? Where the Bolsheviks turned to collectivization to try to turn the peasantry into a rural proletariat, the Left SRs might turn to urban gardening as a way to turn workers into an urban peasantry... Or at least to narrow the gap between the two groups...

Hmmmm...

The other way I could see the Soviets committing to urban gardening as a policy is as part of an attempt to reform the country in the 80s by a more isolated Soviet Union. Without the ability to import meat or grain from America, I can imagine the Soviets turning to such desperate measures to keep food production up and dietary quality up. In a colder Cold War the Soviets might also be able to depend upon patriotism to lubricate the change in lifestyles. If America is a more feared enemy, then like Britain during WW2, the Soviet population might be much more willing to adopt different eating patterns and lifestyles.

(The last is part of what I plan to do in my "Soviet survival TL", in that, the plan is that the Soviets do a mix of things - renting collective land to entrepreneurial farmers, raising food prices, encouraging gardening, introducing new crops, decreasing the output of less productive crops like wheat, decreasing the output of industrial crops like cotton, decreasing beef and dairy production while increasing things like egg and chicken production, increasing the use of greenhouses and polytunnels, cutting the use of agricultural chemicals, increasing funds for agricultural R&D and diverting North Russian and Siberian rivers to feed irrigation in the breadbasket areas. Some of these would work, some of these would turn out to be uneconomical. IMO these might be plausible in the 1980s and 1990s, but, getting back to the OP, in the 1950s I just can't see these happening - the Soviets weren't desperate enough and they hadn't yet hit the limits of extensive industrial agriculture yet.)

fasquardon
 
Last edited:
The choice for the Soviet leadership was to either have a working agricultural sector, or a Party that remained in power. To allow farmers that owned/controlled their farms would open up a can of worms - from higher food prices for the workers in the cities, higher standard of living in the countryside than in the cities, creation of a kulak class et cetera.

Classical communists (ie the europeans) hated farmers, agriculture and the countryside, that they worked very hard to replace with laborers, industry and cities. Farmers existed to produce food, that then was given to the workers without any payment.
I've pretty much been saying this, as a first approximation. Marx has got some phrases that can easily be read as a simple damnation of the country life (the two-word "rural idiocy" comes to mind) and I think he was a city man at heart. Certainly his analysis identifies the proletarian worker as the vanguard of history, the cause from whom the way forward would come, the nucleus of a new society. Mixing this with the pretty well known fact that Bolshevik high leadership generally was not actually proletarian in background (someone with more detailed knowledge of the second tier of names who come up might find someone whose parents really were laborers in some capitalist enterprise but I can't name any--until you get to Khrushchev and later perhaps; his people were miners in Ukraine, the Donbass IIRC); typically they were children of professionals and maybe a few actual peasants. (Mainly thinking of the long-time Charman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet under Stalin, Kalinin; known as the "people's Grandfather" or some such--as in chief village elder. He was a puppet, as the Soviets (in the sense of nominally governing "Councils," the literal translation of the word "soviet") at all levels were in the sense of being strictly subordinated to Party organs, but a closer analysis of Soviet society shows that the Soviets did have roles--they, or newspapers via letters and crusading journalists, were the organs to which people would address complaints and petitions, and were held responsible for strictly administrative stuff the Party did not wish to mess with from a policy point of view--the Party was about policy, the Soviet state organs about execution. Of course in the USSR Party people generally always held some formal state office in the Soviet hierarchy and all important Soviet officials or delegates were Party members. They all wore two hats as it were.

Anyway as individuals with few personal proletarian credentials before the Revolution, the Party leadership was anxious to define and lead an authentically "proletarian" party as they decided it should be, by Marxist-Leninist logic (so often a mere agent of expediency of course). Again I have to wonder what it might have been like had more of their lower-rank cadres, who were indeed largely recruited from actual proletarian ranks, survived the Civil War--but the fact the whole top tier was cluttered with sons of lawyers and former seminarians (Stalin) and so forth does not augur well. Kalinin by the way became a metalworker after moving to St. Petersburg, so his life experience would be much closer to typical post-Revolutionary young Party people who were recruited from the new working class largely immigrating to the cities or other industrial sites from the peasant countryside.

Now the nuance I really wanted to get to here is that these recruits to the Party line included people from the countryside who adhered to and promoted the collective farm system, including legions of schoolteachers. For these people, and they were many though I can't be sure of the true nature of their relationship with the peasant people they came from, the Bolsheviks were bringers of light and progress as well as of course personal opportunity and they were enthusiastic advocates of the regime. Exactly how many less privileged peasants they brought round to their sincere Soviet patriotism I do not know, but this was as it were a two-way ideological "transmission belt" to the central Party machinery.

Perhaps if someone did a TL where Stalin falls down some stairs or something early on, they could do something with a "Kalinin wing" of the Party rising that brings more nuance and sensitivity into the Bolshevik leadership regarding the countryside situation.

But it is inherently difficult to conceive of "Collectivization with a Human Face" or some such--the Party for reasons of Marxist logic wanted and perceived themselves as needing to clamp down on the peasantry and demand production with no backtalk from them, none of course but humble praise and thanks anyway, which they got from their schoolteachers and such. A clever and deeply humane writer might conceive of plausible ways whereby the countryside POV is mixed with a brilliant scheme to bring about suitably non-capitalist socialist enthusiasm and creativity so the peasants were more or less voluntarily self-organizing to produce more efficiently, and get due recognition for their pro-socialist volunteerism and the coercive approach never is imposed in favor of reinforcing the moral authority of countryside progressives. Perhaps PODs making the Social Revolutionaries more cooperative with the Bolsheviks and vice versa before the revolution, more interested in meshing with the Bolsheviks as urban/industrial leaders cooperating with the countryside radicals.

But you are not wrong that aside from pragmatic issues and this all relying on a sort of moral Mary-Sueism that might be plain ASB, the preconceptions of the Marxists in general and the Leninists in particular were disdainful of the country dirt and unlikely to give them a hearing, all the more so if they came from there themselves since they'd think "hey, I woke up and saw the light of the future, why can't you?"

A TL where the whole SR party was more hard leftist and pro-Marxist, but with a forthrightly pro-agrarian slant, and instead of hating and rivaling the Bolsheviks (and I think the reality was more dogmatism, contempt and anxious sense of rivalry on the Bolshie side, the peasants being the numerical majority in the nation after all--as well as a class the old Romanov regime had successfully manipulated into obedient service for centuries, though things had changed for the peasants by the 1910s and '20s) and the more or less "October" revolution was a firm consolidation of the naturally dominant SR-Bolshevik coalition (in that order, what with SR's base being the majority's peasants) might be somehow workable and if plausibly done, fascinating. But the key would be to change Bolshevik and to a secondary degree SR attitudes, and soften them toward a less aggressively radical, more "bourgeois" parliamentarian mentality deferring more to formal votes and less to the inevitable agenda of Marxist scientific advancement. I mean Leninists would remain confident Marx shows the way but more committed to getting genuine mass approval rather than believing they could simply take over by force and then reshape consciousness to their will. This is pretty much a call for a very different Lenin and radical Russian Social Democrat mentality in general. As I said, the mostly bourgeois class origin leadership cadre of the Bolshevik circle distrusted their own conventional training as probably the seductive voice of treasonous to the proletarian cause revisionism they were quick to condemn in Second International circles generally.

Before I leave the subject though I just want to clarify I don't mean a total surrender to parliamentary procedures, but somewhat more respect for the wisdom of checks and balances, for making and keeping alliances with people whom one does not agree with 100 percent but who are moving in roughly the same direction, for the power of persuasion over compulsion, and yeah, quite a bit more compassion and empathy.

So--yeah, moral Mary Sueism. But not to the point they wouldn't denounce some opponents all out, such as the Kadets and the Tsarist restorationist generally, or the whole self-appointed "Provisional Government" which IMHO had zero legitimacy, not in Russian terms anyway--it mainly looked like a real government to the foreign Entente allies, and of course conservatives preferred it to the Soviets. But to my mind, after the February Revolution the city Soviets were the legitimate government; the PR appointed Constituent Assembly was a farce although one could plausibly have the SR-Bolshevik alliance consolidate their power through packing and overwhelmingly winning in the CA by force of votes probably with some intimidation, force or trick the PR backers to be the ones who violently strike against the Soviets (as they did in OTL anyway) and use the moral authority of winning electorally on all fronts combined with superior street fighting to formally ratify a Soviet-democratic form of state, one in which SR, Bolshevik and a few more on the lefty side genuinely contend for electoral victory with mixed results leading to an ongoing balance of power and gradual largely merging and reconfiguring, with factions disputing different approaches rising and falling by free vote in Soviets.

The way the Soviet system as a democratic hierarchy was supposed to work by the way--all individuals (at least those with standing as working class since grass roots Soviets were formed first within workplaces, and excluded managerial people, just as unions would) vote in their local Soviets as a sort of class-oriented town meeting, only the unit is typically a lot smaller than a town, unless the town is very small. They choose delegates to go to the next level up regional Soviet, on the scale of a town, big part of a city, or portion of a county, then those Soviets in turn send delegates up to a wide regional Soviet such as a province (equivalent to US state here for scaling purposes) and thus on to a national (SFSR) and finally all-Union Supreme Soviet. If we had several parties contending, with no set election times, if we can envision a dynamic whereby the desire of each to "purify" the system by packing the Soviets or hold a coup outside the Soviet hierarchy is checked so the protocol of respecting democratic outcomes in hope of coming back later and remaining fractionally present to form a loyal opposition develops, then I see the system as being driven by percolation from below as it were. Pretty much the whole nation meets in their local Soviets town meeting style, with real power devolving to very local levels, the regional Soviets through local ones combining legislative, executive and judicial power--all actions tend to emerge via the low level Soviets, but checked by the higher levels. People are thus engaged in vigorous local democracy, which can have a mob/lynch tendency but this is policed to limit irrevocable violence. Then formally the grassroots Soviets fluidly change their delegations to the next level up, and so shifting tendencies percolate. Say instead of one representative there are traditionally three going up, and custom and law makes them proportionally chosen, so a divided Soviet sends two from the majority tendency and one from the largest dissenting one, or splits all three for three tendencies, shifting the balances fluidly and continuously going up. With four to say seven levels between the grassroots and the Supreme Soviet, there is considerable time delay, but seeing a wave of a rising tendency percolating upward higher level delegates can trim their sails as it were. The delay factor serves to provide some continuity, as does the irrepressible persistence of dissenters. All parties might agree in principle that party factionalism as such should be deplored in favor of all-worker vision which everyone claims, so formal party structures might dissolve in favor of claims to be a citizen-worker leader first and individuals formerly labeled Bolshevik or SR might wind up shifting back and forth.

It would not be very Soviet if they settled on a basically capitalist economy but there might be space for a fluid and somewhat contradictory swaying back and forth between somewhat privatized versus strongly socialized economic flows, with the visionary communists striving to prove the superiority of planned, coordinated flows in contrast to market-based ones, and this might lead to a workable form of democratically regulated coordinated development.
 
So far as I know, no-one in East or West was considering that sort of urban development. Certainly in the Soviet Union, one has to overcome their ideas on progress. The Bolsheviks bought heavily into the ideas of progress that were fashionable in the early 20th Century (and indeed are STILL fashionable a century later) - they wanted to turn the USSR into an urbanized, technologically advanced state where food was grown and harvested with a minimum of human labour - basically, they wanted the country to be the USA with Socialism. So far as I am aware, the US was not designing garden cities in the 1920s.

Then there's the whole status thing. The founding Bolsheviks and many of the middle manager types and footsoldiers were urbanites (whether old or new, it didn't matter) who looked down on the rural bumpkins. I suspect that forcing people to garden like peasants might cause some discontent among this politically important constituency.
But of course, the top down central leadership would deplore urban gardening. It happened OTL anyway since you had a new industrial working class drawn off the land, who knew all about gardening, confronting an unreliable centralized food supply. Prudence dictated the gardens. As OTL the regime never embraced it; I'm wondering about the possibility of some influential Party types making a virtue of necessity and appropriating the phenomenon as a way forward.

Pretty much the definition of "Soviet Socialism" was to accomplish a goal with outcomes that could be boasted as catching up to and overtaking the West, by means different than capitalists used in some sense. The difference makes it Soviet and Socialist! For ill or good, they never did sit down with Marx's writings, which were focused on analyzing capitalism largely after all and spent little time envisioning how democratic communists would solve pragmatic problems, and developing a rigorously materialist doctrine on how socialist cooperative industrial-modern enterprises would be internally run, integrated and coordinated for scientifically superior outcomes. It was all kludging along on the slogan "Soviets+Electification=Communism" and so forth. As you say, appropriate capitalist technology and subordinate it to the Party and that was the level of analysis--IMHO unfortunately, but also inevitably in that Marxist ideology said they were democratic and the hypocrisy of the sort of tight central control they deemed essential would fly in the face of the ideological foundation. Justified by the ruthlessness of the ongoing class struggle in which they viewed the capitalist world as relentlessly striving to bring them down via subverting the malleable minds of Soviet citizens via old regime mentalities, as they saw it.

Another ideological failing was their mechanistic view of the human mind; Lenin is said (haven't done much primary reading to be honest on this) to have a simplistic notion of mentality as sort of emerging mechanically from imagery and so on; not much insight into the complexities of mind, and of course they were fighting all manner of sentimentality and spiritualistic romanticism. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ignoring some nuances in Marx in so doing of course. They saw nothing wrong with manipulating image and message so as to shape perceptions of reality to order, rather than face serious arguments and confront them respectfully. Kind of like Bush's flaks after the 2004 election pointing out to some journalist that critics were hung up on reality-based thinking, but they weren't bound by that and by implication could shape whatever perceptions they wanted, to hell with fiddling facts. It didn't take long for the Bush mandate to disintegrate after that and the hubris of boasting of their total control and perhaps actual blindness to reality-based reactions possibly had a lot to do with how fast it unraveled for them.
I wonder if such a commitment to urban gardening could come out of a Russian Revolution that was won by the Left SRs? Where the Bolsheviks turned to collectivization to try to turn the peasantry into a rural proletariat, the Left SRs might turn to urban gardening as a way to turn workers into an urban peasantry... Or at least to narrow the gap between the two groups...

Hmmmm...

The other way I could see the Soviets committing to urban gardening as a policy is as part of an attempt to reform the country in the 80s by a more isolated Soviet Union. Without the ability to import meat or grain from America, I can imagine the Soviets turning to such desperate measures to keep food production up and dietary quality up. In a colder Cold War the Soviets might also be able to depend upon patriotism to lubricate the change in lifestyles. If America is a more feared enemy, then like Britain during WW2, the Soviet population might be much more willing to adopt different eating patterns and lifestyles.

(Actually, the last is part of what I plan to do in my "Soviet survival TL", in that, the plan is that the Soviets do a mix of things - renting collective land to entrepreneurial farmers, raising food prices, encouraging gardening, introducing new crops, decreasing the output of less productive crops like wheat, decreasing the output of industrial crops like cotton, decreasing beef and dairy production while increasing things like egg and chicken production, increasing the use of greenhouses and polytunnels, cutting the use of agricultural chemicals, increasing funds for agricultural R&D and diverting North Russian and Siberian rivers to feed irrigation in the breadbasket areas. Some of these would work, some of these would turn out to be uneconomical. IMO these might be plausible in the 1980s and 1990s, but, getting back to the OP, in the 1950s I just can't see these happening - the Soviets weren't desperate enough and they hadn't yet hit the limits of extensive industrial agriculture yet.)

fasquardon

I think by 1980 unless there are some underlying earlier POD knock-ons to give the Communists extra help, such a late divergence is too late; it addresses some serious problems but not others and won't knock-on to the other sectors fast enough to maintain Communist legitimacy, even if they don't do glasnost to open the doors to semi-free criticism. I don't gather the Soviet citizens were going hungry in the '80s--lots of other forms of horribly visible deterioration but not starvation; a better diet won't stave off the ideological disillusionment that pulled the red rug out from under the Party's moral authority in the later decade.

But don't let me dissuade you, it sounds interesting and perhaps you can show how it is sufficient? Note how I suggested knock-ons in the form of better Party attitudes and nuance toward agrarian policy and people which might shift support toward the regime more strongly in the countryside. It is also not my impression the countryside brought down Gorbachev either; the rising against Party authority was in the major cities IIRC but perhaps general reporting of the collapse lacked full nuance?

But personally I think to save the USSR the earlier the POD the better. That creates an enormous task of navigating the amorphous huge thing realistically through a century--by now literally a century--of world developments transformed by reacting to a different USSR.

For what it's worth, I think we can generally take OTL outside of the Soviet Union as baseline with small deviations no matter what happens inside Soviet borders, up to a point; as long as it remains Soviet, Red (in the broader sense SRs might be seen as Red too) and anticapitalist, one could imagine a very soft and cuddly gentle system with all sorts of bourgeois-looking checks, balances, scrupulous rule of law and a tolerant mentality limiting abuses, and still the Western powers will have the same internal dialog of Reds and "pinkos" professing admiration versus the dominant narrative they are a bunch of ruthless and degenerate looting brigands who threaten civilization as a barbaric horde, and must be shut down ruthlessly. OTL people like Henry Wallace and Upton Sinclair could visit and come home saying things like "I've seen the future and it works!" and have a lot of people applaud while a lot more despise them as shills; in an ATL where it was God's own truth and these men and others wandered freely with no censors guiding them to Potemkin villages and came back and said the same stuff, the same ranks would form on both sides. Western reactionaries sadly did not have to make up stories to paint the Bolsheviks as scary, but lacking hard facts they often did anyway; enthusiasts relaying literal observations will be treated just the same as if they made it all up too.

A Mary-Sue Better USSR would perhaps objectively settle with different borders; musing on it I imagined they'd keep at least some of Poland in the aftermath of the early '20s wars for instance, the part east of the Curzon line more or less; truly scary better success in Poland might bring on early unleashing of Germany from Versailles restrictions so the German republic could mobilize stronger defenses, which of course really butterflies the situation in which Hitler might not rise to power despite being there, and so on. Minimizing deviations outside Soviet borders can easily leave the borders as OTL too of course. Given that--the world might muddle along pretty much entirely as OTL (same outcomes of early 20s Bolshevik inspired revolutions for slightly different reasons that won't matter to most people; same outcomes in China and the Spanish Civil War again for moderately different reasons; same Munich pact re CS and same Polish crisis of '39 for instance. Then things start to swerve to another track; can a more open and civil-society minded USSR make the pact with Hitler anyway? If they do, would they still be as taken off guard as Stalin was OTL? I hope no to both, but say eastern Poland in '39 was a hotbed of socialistic dissent with the non-Polish countryside regional majority not afraid to call on Soviet help; perhaps knowing this Moscow makes the pact despite its ugly appearances and taking their assigned eastern zone are welcomed as progressive liberators, with the east-of-Curzon non-Poles happily joining Belarus? Would the pact extend to aiding and abetting Hitler with supplies not to mention moral comfort of hostility to the Western Entente? They certainly wouldn't do everything Stalin did to comply with Hitler's desires (like round up and hand over German refugees the Gestapo wanted and gave the Soviets a list of, which Stalin did regardless of how loyal Communists these Germans might have been) but if they won't comply as much will the Pact break down anyway? Or does there need to be a pact--might the Soviets just opportunistically jump the border as the Polish army collapses, and move on the Baltics and Finland while Hitler holds off, having made a truce in Poland so he can concentrate on the conquest of the West first? Will the Germans and Russians, meeting in the middle of Poland, of necessity go on to total and immediate war, or will they indeed stand down and have a perhaps informal truce? Or will the second war deviate from OTL tracks right there, or vice versa the Soviets stay out of Poland scrupulously? But anyway even if the Red Russia of the ATL is far kinder and gentler, and much more open, that won't stop Hitler from hating them, that won't stop right wing Germans from supporting him, or hoping to "kick down the door of the rotten edifice;" they will believe what they want to.

Soviet victory might even wind up looking much like OTL, right down to a captive Eastern Europe behind an Iron Curtain even if it is less terroristically run; then OTL Cold War might be as OTL too, Vietnam and everything, and so on to the later '70s when the POD finally digs in and goes to very different places.
 
@Shevek23: Well, if you want Bolsheviks who could relate to the peasants, there is Muranov who was born to a peasant family.

And for a more agrarian-friendly Soviet Union, I can imagine a couple possible ways to achieve it.

First, Lenin never makes it to Russia, and the merger with the Mensheviks that was being discussed in March 1917 (when Kamenev, Muranov and Stalin were the top Bolsheviks on the spot) goes ahead. With a large Menshevik component and no Lenin in the merged party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (hence RSDLP) would stick with its "all power to the Soviets" policy, but would wait for the Provisional Government to fail (which IMO it would). Logically, the Left SRs would likely be allied to the RSDLP as they were with the Bolsheviks in OTL, so we'd have a more united Russian left. With the PG failing naturally instead of being overthrown, the RSDLP-SR alliance would have greater legitimacy and while a reactionary insurrection is highly likely, the Civil War in this scenario would be much shorter and more decisive.

Russia post-civil war would also be ruled by a much more democratic Soviet-based government with leftists of a range of opinions in government. As such, the extremist anti-peasant actions of the Bolshevik regime are impossible, and instead the SR's desires dominate rural policy making.

I still think there would be a reaction against rural nouveaux rich (since part of the reason for the liquidation of the Kulaks was to win support with the poorer majority of peasants who had either been used by their newly successful neighbours or were plain jealous), and an interest in collectivization (even if this collectivization was purely voluntary). It is hard to see either becoming anywhere near as extreme as OTL however.

The other option, ironically, is for Lenin to really love Trotsky and make him his successor. Since the other Bolsheviks dislike and fear Trotsky so and since Trotsky's political chops weren't so great at politburo scheming, we might see a situation where Trotsky is strong enough to avoid being deposed and the other top Bolsheviks are strong enough to stop Collectivization (which they would do ONLY because they wanted to stymie Trotsky - leading to a situation where rural matters are handled in a Bukharinist way by default).

But personally I think to save the USSR the earlier the POD the better. That creates an enormous task of navigating the amorphous huge thing realistically through a century--by now literally a century--of world developments transformed by reacting to a different USSR.

Sure. But I like a later PoD because it is better for educational purposes and because if I went with anything earlier, the danger of straying into wank territory grows (Russia had a really, really awful 20th Century and while the odds are that Russia would have had other disasters - even if they were smaller ones - if it had taken other roads, my mind naturally shies away from coming up with new disasters to partially compensate for the disasters my PoD is avoiding).

Also, any PoD before 1939 can easily lead to avoiding WW2 and any PoD before 1947 can easily avoid a Cold War anything like the one we knew (if there would be a cold war at all), which massively changes the rest of the world.

fasquardon
 
Top