WI: USSR Collapses Earlier?

What if the Soviet Union had fallen earlier, leading to an earlier end to the Cold War?


Depend when it happend. I see two possible scenarios.
1. The crisis of 1956 is much bigger. There isn´t just a uprising in Hungary but also one in Poland, which in the end spread to East-Germany and the rest of eastern Europe. The remains of the partisan-movements in the Ukraine and the Baltic get a new bust, the USA think the oppurtunity is just to good and intervene in eastern Europe and in the end the unrest spread to Moscow itself.
2. The USA stay out of Vietnam and the Kennedy-military-build-up goes on. Because the Arabs don´t won´t anger the USA, there is no real oil-price shock and so the USSR got not so much support by there Oil-industrie for the rest of the economy. With the problem, to keep up with the US-defense-spending and a much weaker economy, the USSR collapse in the early 80s.
 
1956 is plausible but i doubt it... Untill Breznev the hardliners had complete control of the Union so any movement that could lead to the collapse of USSR could have been prevented...
However things started to change during the brief tenures of Adropov and Chernenko and completely disintegrated when Gorbachev took over...
Hardliners were sidelined and reformists assumed power... Ironically it was the hardliners who accelerated the collapse with the botched August Coup...
 
You're seeing that right now. The answer is... not good in a lot of ways. A superpower already tries to push the ideals of its nation on the world. When it comes to economics, for the USA that means neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism has utterly failed every time it has been tried, and most of the time has forced the state to throw off in about 6 years.

The exception is Chile, but that was because of a totalitarian government, and the state still intervening to reduce inflation and even did bail outs. Why? The economy crashed so badly, and so frequently, that revolution was quite possible many times. Add in alcoholism increasing by four times compared to previous rates, and massive unemployment, and you get a failed experiment.

Chile was put into practice by the USA. The USA would've attempted to do more, and the world would've suffered for it. Chile was done through a CIA coup during the Cold War. If the Cold War ended, expect a lot more of that type of experiment.
 
You're seeing that right now. The answer is... not good in a lot of ways. A superpower already tries to push the ideals of its nation on the world. When it comes to economics, for the USA that means neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism has utterly failed every time it has been tried, and most of the time has forced the state to throw off in about 6 years.

The exception is Chile, but that was because of a totalitarian government, and the state still intervening to reduce inflation and even did bail outs. Why? The economy crashed so badly, and so frequently, that revolution was quite possible many times. Add in alcoholism increasing by four times compared to previous rates, and massive unemployment, and you get a failed experiment.

Chile was put into practice by the USA. The USA would've attempted to do more, and the world would've suffered for it. Chile was done through a CIA coup during the Cold War. If the Cold War ended, expect a lot more of that type of experiment.

Well Neo-liberism is a 80's thing at earliest so if the Soviet Union fall before that period is not assured that neo-liberism will become so important and frankly after the fall of the URSS we had seeing a USA grudually reduce is military forces and trying to limit is commitment at least till the 9/11 not a score of CIA backed coup
 
It wouldn't need the CIA, you would perhaps see a USA though trying to push laize-fair on the world(what neo-liberalism is basically.) During the Cold War, since it had to economically compete, the USA couldn't do such economic experiments as often. Now... well, lets just say we're paying some prices. If the USSR kept on going past Reagen's era, his type of politics wouldn't have caught on from economic issues caused by them.
 
You're not going to see US intervention in aid of the Eastern Europeans in 1856, and if you did it'd be WWIII. For the first point the uprising in Hungary was against Moscow authoritarianism, not against socialism or even communism. You'd see a more democratic east bloc. To the second point, any Western interference in the Soviets backyard is going to lead to an East-West conflict very, very quickly, as we've discussed multiple times before.
 

Phyrx

Banned
You're seeing that right now. The answer is... not good in a lot of ways. A superpower already tries to push the ideals of its nation on the world. When it comes to economics, for the USA that means neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism has utterly failed every time it has been tried, and most of the time has forced the state to throw off in about 6 years.

The exception is Chile, but that was because of a totalitarian government, and the state still intervening to reduce inflation and even did bail outs. Why? The economy crashed so badly, and so frequently, that revolution was quite possible many times. Add in alcoholism increasing by four times compared to previous rates, and massive unemployment, and you get a failed experiment.

Chile was put into practice by the USA. The USA would've attempted to do more, and the world would've suffered for it. Chile was done through a CIA coup during the Cold War. If the Cold War ended, expect a lot more of that type of experiment.
Don't wanna get into an economic debate here, but I just wanna point out that the Chilean coup would have gone ahead without any US intervention at all. It wasn't just something the CIA cooked up; it had the whole Chilean Armed Forces behind it.

That said, I'm a strong believer in political self-determination. So I'm not condoning the US endorsement. I'm just saying, I think people overestimate the amount of stuff the US actually did, as far as overthrowing other countries. There are exceptions -- Iran in '53, for example. But in general the US is barely ever the largest factor in a coup. You can argue that even that's too much, but, you know. Gotta do something to skyrocket the deficit. :p
 
It may not have been successful though, and also, people like Milton Friedman were called to draft the economic plan for this new nation. The results... were quite horrid. But the point is that without CIA intervention, the coup probably would've... been just another coup. It wouldn't have turned Chile into a laize-fair hell probably.
 
What about an earlier post-Cold War world? And how would the world do with the United States as the only superpower earlier?

If we go with the scenario 1956/57 we will propably butterfly away the EU. The POD would be before the forming of the EEC and I´m not sure if France would want to be part of a community with the new reunited Germany. We would propably see a Europe today comparable to the late twenties (1925-29), no real hostility between the nations, but no joint organizations. In the USA we will propably see a revival of isolationism. "The job is finally done. Bring the boys and the dollars home. The Europeans and the UNO can do the rest alone!" But on the other side, I assume many will still see the need to contain "the last stronghold of the red menace", China. It could end in a politic to prevent China from getting nuclear weapons at any price. And I think Russia will make an revival in the 60s. It wouldn´t be so completly economical and demgrafic ruined by the communist like IOTL and it would go through a economical transition in a time, where coal and steel was still a very important part of the economic strengh of a nation. And we are still far away from neo-liberlism at this time. Kenseyism is still the favorite economic flavor. And so there will be an kenseyistic approach to rebuild the economy of Russia and eastern Europe.
I assume we still have some kind of counterculture-movement in the 60s, but with Marxism already discreeted, it may go in a different direction.
I discussed this scenario several years ago with John Reilly and his opinion was, at least in the USA the counterculture-movement could take on the form of an new religous awakening.
 
What if the Soviet Union had fallen earlier, leading to an earlier end to the Cold War?

It depends on when, obviously, but one possibility is a lower level of advancement in technology. The Cold War (including NASA) spurred a lot of R&D out of the Pentagon budget and gave us such things as advancements in aerospace technology, computing technology, the Internet (originally a DARPA project) and the GPS system. It is far from clear that private industry would have been so ambitious in developing new technology. Nothing against the private sector, mind you, just that it's hard to justify huge R&D budgets to stockholders, especially when the projects involved are pie-in-the-sky ideas in their day. Eventually, we'd get there, but the progress could well have been slower, perhaps by as much as 15-20 years depending on what you pick as an endpoint for the Cold War.
 
But if USSR is going down in between 1956 and 1980 how are we supposed to keep the hardliners at bay so they wont go nuts in any signs of USSR collapsing?
The Old Guard Communists were the "glue" that held USSR in one piece... once they were gone in late 80s the new generation of Communists took over and started experimenting with reforms...
 
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