Year of the Three Secretaries - A Soviet survival TL

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Chapter I: Two Funerals and an Excommunication, 1968-1970.
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    • Onkel Willie

    So, I've finally managed to concoct a new TL in which I didn't lose interest in writing halfway through :p. Here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

    Year of the Three Secretaries
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    Chapter I: Two Funerals and an Excommunication, 1968-1970.
    ​
    In the 1950s Czechoslovak de-Stalinization had commenced under the leadership of Antonín Novotný, but it had been slower than in the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Nonetheless, dissidents cautiously started to air their discontent while Czechoslovakia experienced an economic downturn because the Stalinist model of industrialization didn’t apply to the country very well. Economic reform in the early 1960s brought on the demand for political reform and Dubček replaced Novotný as First Secretary on January 5th 1968, the latter having no support, not even from Brezhnev who realized how unpopular the Czechoslovak leader was. On March 22nd 1968, Novotný resigned his presidency and was replaced by Ludvík Svoboda, who later endorsed the reforms that provoked a Warsaw Pact invasion. In April, Dubček launched an “Action Programme” of liberalizations, which included increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement, with economic emphasis on consumer goods and the possibility of a multiparty government. The programme was based on the view that “Socialism cannot mean only liberation of the working people from the domination of exploiting class relations, but must make more provisions for a fuller life of the personality than any bourgeois democracy.” It would limit the power of the secret police and provide for the federalization of the CSSR into two equal nations. The programme also covered foreign policy, including both the maintenance of good relations with Western countries and cooperation with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc nations. It spoke of a ten-year transition through which democratic elections would be made possible and a new form of democratic socialism would replace the status quo. Those who drafted the Action Programme were careful not to criticize the actions of the post-war communist regime; instead they only pointed out policies that they felt had outlived their usefulness.
    ​
    Eastern bloc leaders grew worried, especially as far as the increasing public criticism of the regime in Czechoslovakia was concerned, believing it could weaken the communist bloc. Moscow tried to stop or at least limit the reforms, but talks proved fruitless and the Soviet leadership made common cause with the other members of the “Warsaw Five”, namely the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. The Soviet Union’s policy of making the socialist governments of its satellite states subordinate their national interests to those of the “Eastern Bloc” (through military force if needed) became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. On the night of 20-21 August 1968, Eastern Bloc armies from four Warsaw Pact countries invaded the CSSR, Romania and Albania being the only Warsaw Pact countries that refrained from doing so (Albania had withheld support since 1961 over the Sino-Soviet split and formally cancelled its membership in 1968 the day after the invasion of Czechoslovakia).

    There was significant backlash for the Soviet Union: Romania depicted Soviet policies in harsh terms in a speech in Bucharest, Albania formally quit the Warsaw Pact and denounced the invasion as “social-imperialism”, Soviet citizens protested on Red Square, the Czechoslovaks practiced passive, non-violent resistance, the occupation caused major scandal in Finland which was under some Soviet influence, and Western communist parties heavily criticized the Soviet Union. The issue caused quite some stress for General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – the de facto leading position of the USSR – Leonid Brezhnev.

    The Soviet leader was a heavy smoker and an alcoholic as well as being addicted to sleeping pills and during the night of 28-29 August, after over a week of relentless criticism and bad press, he took more booze and sleeping pills than normal and doing so put him to sleep permanently. He died sitting in his chair of a fatal combination of liquor and pills in his apartment on 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning as the coroner would later put in his rapport, a redacted version of which ended up locked away in a KGB file cabinet. He died at age 61 and was found in the morning by his wife Viktoria Brezhneva who in a state of panic screamed and alerted the neighbours, among whom were Chairman of the State Committee for State Security (the KGB) Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov, the ‘éminence grise’ of the Soviet Union’s leadership. The two acted to keep the news from leaking for a while to have an autopsy done, with especially the KGB being rather paranoid about the possibility that some foreign intelligence service had poisoned the Soviet leader. The coroner’s report in this regard was anticlimactic and, of course, it couldn’t under any circumstances be revealed to the public that their leader had succumbed to drug addiction. When the news was released the next day on radio and television it was, therefore, reported that Brezhnev had died of a heart attack on Thursday August 29th. A state funeral was organized where 32 heads of state, fifteen heads of government, fourteen foreign ministers and four princes attended, among them Fidel Castro, Wladyslaw Gomulka and US Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

    Suslov was in a good position to succeed Brezhnev as General Secretary, but was reluctant to as he preferred to rule from the shadows through a puppet. He found a good candidate in Soviet politician Arvīds Pelše who didn’t really have a strong powerbase by himself, him being a Latvian and therefore a non-Slav. He’d been elected member of the politburo in 1966 during the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party, one of the few non-Slavs to receive that honour. Pelše became General Secretary because Suslov threw his weight, and thereby that of the hardliners in the party, behind him. Pelše appointed Suslov to be Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (President). He thereby replaced and marginalized Nikolai Podgorny, who would end up siding with Kosygin who also saw himself marginalized despite retaining his title Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Premier). Suslov had replaced Podgorny for the simple reason that he thought that doing so strengthened his position. Neither Suslov nor Pelše would be in power for long.

    Viktor Ivanovich Ilyin was born in Leningrad in 1948 and after his graduation from a technical college he was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1968 at the rank of lieutenant. Ilyin resented his conscription and deeply distressed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. On January 21st 1969, Ilyin stole two standard-issue Makarov handguns and deserted his army unit. He went back to his family in Leningrad where he stole his brother-in-law’s authentic police uniform and then left for Moscow on his own. Dressed like a police officer, Ilyin moved unimpeded through a large crowd waiting at the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate, where a special motorcade was expected to pass: it would be bearing the successful cosmonauts of Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 to an official Soviet ceremony of the highest order. The spaceflight crewmembers – Vladimir Shatalov, Boris Volynov, Yevgeny Khrunov, and Aleksei Yeliseyev – had returned only a week earlier from their historic manned ship-to-manned ship docking mission in space, the first of its kind. Arriving at Vnukovo Airport, they were being driven with Pelše and Suslov to their commemorative celebration inside the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. The four honourees rode in an open convertible at the front of the line, waving to spectators while a line of closed limousines trailed behind them. Ilyin sawPelše and Suslov in the open car with the cosmonauts and took aim with his pistols, firing a total of fifteen rounds before he was overpowered after a guard ran him down with his motorcycle. Pelše was hit three times in the chest and could not be saved and Suslov was hit in the shoulder above the heart, bleeding profusely. Ilyin hit the car several times as well and also mortally wounded cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov and the driver. The urns containing the ashes of Shatalov and Pelše would both be interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis just like Brezhnev’s urn the previous year.

    Pelše was the second General Secretary to be buried in less than six months time, being assassinated at age 69, and again a power struggle ensued. Podgorny, still a politburo member, denounced Suslov by blaming him for Pelše’s death because Suslov had allowed him to be in the same car as the cosmonauts, an open convertible. KGB chief Yuri Andropov had warned that this brought about security risks. Suslov in turn tried to denounce Andropov by accusing him of incompetence, but the latter deflected the blame by pointing out: 1) that Suslov had ignored his advice by travelling in the same open convertible as the cosmonauts rather than in a separate, closed armoured limousine, 2) the size of the security detail, 3) that Ilyin had looked like an actual policeman and 4) that Ilyin’s army unit had failed to report his desertion in time.

    The hardliners fell into disarray in the weeks following Pelše’s assassination and the attack on Suslov in the politburo, and that allowed Premier Alexei Kosygin to become the new General Secretary of the Party (and de facto leader of the country) when in March 1969 the 24th Party Congress was organized. Kosygin gave up the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers and appointed Yuri Andropov in his place while a relative non-entity, Vitaly Fedorchuk, head of military counterintelligence, became head of the KGB. Nikolai Podgorny was reappointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and this gave him a vested interest in keeping Kosygin was in charge. Kosygin was the third General Secretary in under a year, and he would prove to be the last for the time being. Thusly the period from August 1968 to March 1969 has become known as “the Year of the Three Secretaries” among historians of the Soviet Union, a veiled reference to “the Year of the Four Emperors” of the Roman Empire in 69 AD. The Kosygin-Andropov-Podgorny triumvirate would collectively rule for over a decade while Mikhail Suslov died of a heart attack at age 70 in 1972 (commonly attributed to the failed attempt to assassinate him) as a marginal figure in Soviet politics.

    Kosygin first tried to implement a reform that he had already tried to push through in 1965, but which had crashed because anti-reformism had been the dominant stance. Evsei Liberman of the Kharkiv Institute of Engineering and Economics had published a paper, which had marked the beginning of extensive economical discussions. Kosygin now finally got to experiment and without tremendous opposition, his plans could now come to fruition. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Ministers agreed to conduct the following reforms:
    1) Enterprises became the main economic units
    2) The number of policy targets was reduced from 30 to 9. The rest remained indicators: total output at current wholesale prices, the most important products in physical units, the total payroll, total profits and profitability, expressed as the ratio of profit to fixed assets and working capital normalized; payments to the budget and appropriations from the budget; total capital investment targets for the introduction of new technology, the volume of supply of raw materials and equipment.
    3) Economic independence of enterprises: enterprises were required to determine the detailed range and variety of products, using their own funds to invest in production, establish long-term contractual arrangements with suppliers and customers and to determine the number of personnel.
    4) Key importance was attached to the integral indicators of economic efficiency of production – profits and profitability. There was the opportunity to create a number of funds based on the expense of profits – funds for the development of production, material incentives, housing, etc. The enterprise was allowed to use the funds at its discretion.
    5) Pricing: Wholesale sales prices now had to be profitable.

    Besides the above reforms, that had been part of the original failed 1965 Liberman-Kosygin reform, two more measures were included in the 1970 Liberman-Kosygin reform: 1) the Regional Economic Councils abolished by Brezhnev in order to end Khrushchev’s decentralization experiment were reinstated, all 47 of them. They strongly reduced the burden on the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), the superior state institution for economic planning. 2) Material and financial incentives were officially instated by the government in order to encourage productivity. These reforms meant a liberalization of the Soviet economy and also an introduction of mildly capitalistic elements in an otherwise state dominated socialist economy. The plan would greatly increase the standard of living and give a boost to the production of consumer goods, which had always been treated as being of secondary importance by Soviet leaders, until now. Kosygin also assumed a much more hard-line stance than Brezhnev toward corruption, Brezhnev having chosen a nonconfrontational policy (basically pretending the problem didn’t exist).
     
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    • Thande

    Thande

    Donor
    Interesting. I should imagine the assassination of Pelse will provoke just as many conspiracy theories both inside and outside the USSR as Kennedy's assassination did in the US - especially considering Pelse being a Latvian, there will be some who would claim it was an inside job by those who didn't want a non-Russian or -Ukrainian at the top.
     
    kurtstallings

    kurtstallings

    Interesting!

    Good to see poor old Evsei Grigorievich dusted off and in the running again! Years ago, I read something by (the now late) Alec Nove on Liberman and Kosygin's sponsorship of his work.
     
    Chapter II: Détente, Reform and Afghanistan, 1970-1979.
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    • Onkel Willie

    Update :D.

    Chapter II: Détente, Reform and Afghanistan, 1970-1979. ​

    In the meantime, Kosygin continued the Soviet Union’s foreign policy of détente, which among others resulted in the signing of the 1970 Treaty of Moscow. During the 1970s while Willy Brandt was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), the country followed a foreign relations policy of Ostpolitik. It “abandoned, at least for the time being, its claims with respect to German self-determination and reunification, recognising de facto the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Oder-Neisse Line”. The Treaty of Moscow was the first of several friendship treaties between West and East Germany. Both sides expressed their ambition to strive for a normalization of the relations between the European states while keeping international peace and to follow the guidelines of the article no. 2 of the UN Charter. The signatories renounced the use of force, and recognised the post-World War II borders – specifically the Oder-Neisse Line which hived off a large portion of historical eastern Germany to Poland and the USSR. It also enshrined the division between East and West Germany, thus contributing a valuable element of stability into the relationship between the two countries. It was followed by the September 1971 Four Power Agreement on Berlin, which re-established ties between the two halves of the city that had been severed a decade earlier. In the 1972 Basic Treaty the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic officially recognised each other and both became UN member states the following year.

    Besides these treaties concerning the relations between the two German states, there was the 1970 Treaty of Warsaw between West Germany and the People’s Republic of Poland: in the treaty, both sides committed themselves to non-violence and accepted the existing border imposed on Germany by the Allied powers at the 1945 Potsdam Conference following the end of World War II. And then there was the so-called Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, also known as SALT I, between the two dominant nuclear powers of the world, the USA and the USSR. SALT I froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and provided for the addition of new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers only after the same number of older intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. Additionally, one clause of the treaty required both countries to limit the number of sites protected by an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system to two each: the United States chose to protect a base of Minuteman ICBM fields in North Dakota against counterforce attack to thus allow an unimpeded US retaliatory strike (the Safeguard Program); the Soviets chose to protect Moscow and the surrounding missile fields.

    The success of Kosygin’s reforms and his foreign policy successes ensured that the reformist faction was firmly entrenched in power by the early 1970s. That allowed the Soviet leader to continue his reforms and ensure that the socialist story remained one of success.

    The 1970s proved a period of remarkable dynamism in the Soviet Union and also in the Eastern Bloc with mainly economic reforms, political dictatorship being maintained. Kosygin, to begin with, turned to address the issues of the USSR’s agricultural sector because it had been consistently underperforming for years. Import of cereals had begun under Khrushchev and it was starting to get seen as a normal phenomenon, but Kosygin considered it anything but normal considering Russia had traditionally been a cereal exporter. Politburo member Gennady Voronov, an ally of Kosygin, advocated for the division of each farm’s work-force into what he called “links”. These “links” would be entrusted with specific functions, such as to run a farm’s dairy unit. His argument was that the larger the work force, the less responsible they felt, and Kosygin happened to agree. The Central Committee and the Council of Ministers passed this measure in April 1971 and it produced a small but noticeable increase in agricultural production, which encouraged the ruling Kosygin-Andropov-Podgorny triumvirate to continue on a path of moderate economic reform.

    As far as agriculture was concerned, reformists started to see the need for de-collectivization more and more, even basing themselves on an ideological argument to disarm the hard-line opposition: collectivization had been introduced to redistribute land from the kulaks to the benefit of the landless peasantry, but the latter class group no longer existed thanks to socialist agronomic policies and therefore collective farming had outlived its usefulness. That was how the reformist argument went, which was effective even though it rather ignored historical reality, namely the insane death toll caused by collectivization in the shape of the 1932-’33 famine (it cost an estimated 5.5 million lives across the Soviet Union, 3 million of them in Ukraine) and the fact that the kulaks had largely been invented by the state. Immediate de-collectivization was too great a change even to a large number of reformists, so Kosygin instead pushed it through incrementally. After the “links” plan was pushed through in spring 1971, kolkhozes were allowed to sell their produce on local markets for prices determined by themselves (rather than the state) from autumn of the same year. Sovkhozes – which were state-owned farms rather than “collective farms” like the kolkhozes, based on the Russian tradition of communal farming – were excluded from this reform. Agricultural production again increased, the reason being that farmers working at the kolkhozes now had a financial-material incentive to do so.

    Agricultural reforms had to be accompanied by reforms in industry, something that the 1970 Liberman-Kosygin reform had provided a foundation for. Companies had significant autonomy because of that reform compared to before 1970, particularly in the fields of investment, wages, contractual arrangements with suppliers and customers, personnel management and material incentives (i.e. bonuses). The major underlying problem with socioeconomic reforms, as they had progressed by the early 70s, was that, while income had gone up, there was little to spend it on. A consumer oriented light industry barely existed in the Soviet Union at the time because state planning had subordinated it to heavy industry (pushing heavy industry had succeeded in creating economic growth until the 1950s-60s). But like complete de-collectivization was unacceptable to even reformers in Moscow, so was the nationwide creation of a private sector of light industry. The core of the problem was that there was an entrenched state sector taking all the resources that had the teeth to fight back. Incrementally introducing free market elements was the only way to eventually bring it to the rest of the USSR (which also applied to agriculture, albeit less so considering communism focuses on the “working class”).

    In 1974, Kronstadt, Sevastopol, Sochi, Baku and Vladivostok were designated “Special Economic Zones” where free enterprise in the field of light industry was permitted and where the communist bureaucratic machine had little power: small businesses producing clothes, shoes, furniture, consumer electronics and home appliances popped up like mushrooms in these areas and so people flocked to these places because the local economies in these places were boosted significantly. The project attracted Western investors and entrepreneurs as well and that increased economic growth in these areas even more. In 1976, economic growth in these areas was double that of the national average and so Kaliningrad and Novorossiysk were added to the list of Special Economic Zones.

    Especially remarkable among the Special Economic Zones was Sochi, the leading sanatorium and health resort of the Soviet Union. Sochi was also a city frequently used for informal meetings with foreign dignitaries, the city having been the unofficial “summer capital” since Stalin. The reason was the attractive subtropical climate: in the coldest months – January and February – the average temperature is about 10 °C during the day, above 3 °C at night; in the warmest months – July and August – the temperature typically ranges from 25 to 29 °C during the day and about 20 °C at night;     its average annual temperature is 18.4 °C during the day and 11 °C at night. Due to Stalin’s development of the city – his favourite dacha had been built there – it had become a major tourist destination, receiving about 4 million tourists a year by 1970, although only about 160.000 of those were foreign tourists. This number of visitors was 32 times the number of inhabitants of the coastal city, the population being only around 125.000 at the time.

    A few Soviet citizens whose entrepreneurial spirit had survived over fifty years of communism decided to capitalize on the economic freedom they had. This group realized the massive amount of money that could be made if Western tourists were to be attracted to Sochi and they formed a travel agency: it provided tourism related services to the public on behalf of suppliers such as airlines, car rentals, cruise lines, hotels, railways, and package tours. It’s not a coincidence that private versions of this activity – as opposed to state owned hotels and whatnot – popped up at the same time as the travel agency did. Plenty of people already working in the existing state controlled tourism branch realized the potential of a “Riviera on the Black Sea” considering it could attract many Western tourists who couldn’t afford the expensive hotels in the actual French Riviera, never mind Monaco. By the late 1970s, advertisements for comparatively cheap (by Western standards) vacations to a luxury seaside resort were becoming increasingly common in the West. Besides that, alpinists were also catered to with the Caucasus Mountains being nearby. Elitists would mockingly refer to it as the “proletarian Riviera”, but that was exactly its success formula: the number of tourists travelling to Sochi each year had doubled by 1980 and the percentage of foreign (particularly Western) tourists had more than tripled from 4% to 13% by then. In absolute numbers over 1 million foreign tourists were travelling to Sochi each year by 1980, a staggering growth of 650% in ten years time. The luxury that was normally only affordable for the well-to-do was now accessible to regular middle class people. The result was that Sochi became a regional economic hub and saw an enormous population growth, temporarily resulting in housing shortages until the city, being slow to respond, addressed the issue in the early 1980s. By 2013 the city has 500.000 inhabitants.

    In the late 1970s, reforms came to a temporary halt because Moscow’s attention was drawn away to the country’s southern flank. King Mohammed Zahir Shah ascended to the throne and reigned from 1933 to 1973. Zahir’s cousin, Mohammad Daoud Khan, served as Prime Minister from 1954 to 1963. The Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan’s (PDPA’s) strength grew considerably in these years. Former Prime Minister Daoud staged a military coup d’état in 1973, putting an end to the Afghan monarchy after allegations of corruption and poor economic conditions against the King’s government. Intense opposition from factions of the PDPA was sparked by the repression imposed on them by Daoud’s regime and the death of a leading PDPA member, Mir Akbar Khyber. The mysterious circumstances of Khyber’s death sparked massive anti-Daoud demonstrations in Kabul, which led to the arrest of several prominent PDPA leaders. In April 1978, the Afghan Army, which had been sympathetic to the PDPA cause, took down Daoud and executed him along with members of his family. Nur Muhammad Taraki, Secretary General of the PDPA, became President of the Revolutionary Council and Prime Minister of the newly established Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

    In 1978, the Taraki government initiated a series of reforms, including a radical modernization of the traditional Islamic civil and especially marriage law, aimed at “uprooting feudalism” in Afghan society. The government accepted no dissidence toward the reforms and responded violently to protest. Thousands of prisoners, perhaps as many as 27.000, were executed at the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison, including many village mullahs and headmen, in six months time. Other members of the traditional elite, the religious establishment and intelligentsia fled the country.

    Large parts of the country went into open rebellion. The uprising began in October in the north-eastern part of the country near the border with Pakistan, and rapidly spread among the other ethnic groups. By spring 1979, 24 of the 28 provinces had suffered outbreaks of violence and the rebellion began to take hold in the cities too: in March 1979 in Herat, rebels led by Ismail Khan revolted. Between 3.000 and 5.000 people were killed and wounded during the Herat revolt, including 100 Soviet citizens and their families. In 1979, the contentious law and order situation led to a serious diplomatic incident involving the United States, the USSR and Afghanistan when US Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs was kidnapped by four militants belonging to radical communist faction, Settam-e-Melli. The US increased pressure on the Afghan government and the Soviet Union, forcefully demanding for peaceful negotiations for the release of their ambassador. Negotiations failed and in attempted rescue by Afghan security forces, the ambassador was killed in the crossfire. Afterwards the United States formally expressed to the Soviet Union its disapproval of the assault by the security forces, putting more stress on American-Soviet relations. In the meantime, Afghans were deserting the army en masse.

    After the Herat uprising, Nur Mohammad Taraki repeatedly requested the Soviets to intervene militarily, but Kosygin refused, stating that intervention “would only play into the hands of our enemies, both yours and ours”. He feared that Afghanistan would become the Soviet Vietnam. Instead Kosygin heavily pressured Taraki to undo the most radical reforms, that riled up the conservative elements so much, and to end internal squabbles in his party by seeking a compromise with dissident factions to ensure a unified leadership. Taraki relented and did as the Soviets said and sought compromise with party dissidents and in the meantime reached out to the more moderate elements among conservative tribal leaders. Both efforts were successful in soaking off rebels from the hard core Islamic fundamentalists.

    However, Kosygin was under politburo pressure to do something about the situation directly: a geo-strategic fear of the USSR was a pro-American South Asian alliance consisting of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan; that could constitute a major obstacle in any future confrontation with the West. Kosygin decided on a limited intervention that would not see the massive use of ground troops, instead consisting mostly of air support and artillery support. In August 1979, the Soviet Air Force deployed 3.000 paratroopers to secure the Afghan airbases at Mazar-i-Sharif, Shindand and Bagram to the delight of President Taraki. A Soviet infantry brigade was deployed to Kabul to protect vital government and party buildings. The three airfields each saw the deployment of a squadron MiG-23 fighters and a squadron of Su-24 attack aircraft to provide air support for Afghan ground troops. In the following weeks the Soviets established a perimeter around these airfields and provided the paratroopers there with BTR-70 armoured personnel carriers and BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles. Three artillery battalions with Katyusha rocket launchers, D-20 152 mm howitzers and D-74 122 mm field guns were also sent to assist offensives of the Afghan Army. The Su-24s proved extremely effective against rebels who only had infantry and technicals to their disposal. Soviet artillery provided devastating saturation bombardment which absolutely annihilated entire formations and that quickly taught the rebels to not engage the enemy in open combat. Also, the Soviet Army deployed a single company of spetznaz commandos to assist the Afghans in special operations. Besides this, the Soviets sold weapons about 30% below the original price: T-72 tanks, MiG-23 fighters, Su-24 attack planes, Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships, BTR-70 armoured personnel carriers, BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, Makarov handguns and AK-47 assault rifles. Lastly, the Soviets provided two battalions of trainers to train soldiers and police officers respectively and gave the regime a 100 million dollar low interest loan.

    Moscow had deployed 11.000 ground troops by the end of September 1979. Additionally, there were 216 pilots in Afghanistan at a given time (the Soviet Air Force rotated its pilots) and there was a maintenance staff of around 1.000 for the aircraft. The size of the maintenance staff had to do with the fact that Soviet planes were flying multiple sorties a day, which resulted in wear and tear setting in very quickly. The Soviet contingent in Afghanistan was only slightly less than 12.500 men strong – or less than a division – but provided a significant boost to the Afghan regime’s war effort and to morale among its supporters. Whatever the case, the Soviet Union wouldn’t be able to deploy more troops to Afghanistan anyway because they would soon be distracted again.
     
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    • Michel Van

    Michel Van

    very good Kosygin timeline !

    better as my Ronald Reagan's Space Exploration Initiative:
    after Brezhnev assassination, Kosygin reform the USSR, but still power struggle between Hardliner and Reformer and not go into Afganistan.
    1980s Ronald Reagan face a economic healthy, but political unstable USSR, that collapse after failed hardliner putsch in 1991.
    reborn as economic Union of Sovereign State

    I wonder what Reagan gonna face here


    By the way, Onkel Willie

    can i start up a page In the AH Wiki about this TL ?
     

    Deleted member 67076

    Excellent timeline. Well, it should be expected from the guy who made Frieza good.:D
     

    LeX

    Seems like the Soviets have gotten involved, but hopefully it seems it'll be a smaller-scale involvement (and hopefully much shorter!) than OTL.
     
    Chapter III: The Soviet-Iranian War and its Aftermath, 1979-1980.
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    • Onkel Willie

    Update time :D.

    Chapter III: The Soviet-Iranian War and its Aftermath, 1979-1980. ​

    In October 1978, demonstrations and strikes commenced against the regime of Mohammad Shah Pahlavi that escalated into civil resistance that paralyzed Iran. The Shah left Iran for exile on January 16th 1979 as the country’s last monarch and, in the wake of this power vacuum, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Teheran two weeks later to a greeting by several million Iranians. The Shah’s regime collapsed shortly after on February 11th when guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah in armed street fighting. Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic Republic on April 1st 1979 and to approve a new democratic-theocratic hybrid constitution whereby Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country, in December 1979.

    The admission of the Shah to the United States intensified Iranian revolutionary anti-Americanism and spawned rumours of another US backed coup and re-installation of the Shah. Khomeini, who had been exiled by the Shah for 15 years, heightened rhetoric against the “Great Satan”, the United States, talking of what he called “evidence of American plotting”. In addition to putting an end to what they believed was American plotting and sabotage against the revolution, the hostage takers hoped to depose the provisional revolutionary government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, which they believed was plotting to normalize relations with the United States and extinguish Islamic revolutionary enthusiasm. The students were divided on the issue of seizing either the US embassy or the Soviet embassy, America being the “Great Satan” and the Soviet Union being a “godless, atheist Marxist nation”. One was only slightly less evil than the other and which one was more evil depended almost entirely on the position on the individual revolutionary Muslim. By approving of hostage taking Khomeini rallied support and deflected criticism from his controversial Islamic theocratic constitution, which was due for a referendum vote in less than one month. Khomeini, like most religious fanatics, wasn’t the most logical thinker and came to the conclusion that seizing the embassies of both “satanic powers” would double his support. Revolutionaries, starting with students, took over the embassies on November 6th 1979 and the regime soon became involved.

    Both Moscow and Washington DC were infuriated, but President Jimmy Carter was more interested in negotiations to defuse the situation than his Soviet counterpart Kosygin was. The two super powers’ utter failure to coordinate was the result, as evidenced by the fact that the Soviet Union unilaterally issued an ultimatum to the regime in Teheran that demanded the release of Soviet hostages within 72 hours. Failure to comply would have “serious consequences” which, however, weren’t specified. The Soviet leadership and public opinion in that country were riled up further when images of hostages being paraded in front of booing, chanting crowds reached national television. Unbeknownst to the media, the hostages were being subjected to beatings, theft, being forbidden to speak to each other, being forced into solitary confinement, being blindfolded, their captors playing Russian roulette with them, and to mock executions.

    That last went wrong when on November 10th 1979 an Iranian captor accidentally left a single round in his pistol and inadvertently shot dead a Soviet hostage during a mock execution. In a panic the hostage takers killed the other five captives in the room: the in vain pleas for mercy and the gunshots were of course overheard by other guards and captives alike and inescapably leaked to the outside world within days. This coincided with a botched Soviet rescue attempt intended as a response to the expiration of the ultimatum the day before on November 9th: in the evening of November 10th the Soviets sent twelve Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships with a total of 60 spetznaz commandos aboard to storm the embassy and rescue their hostages. Contrary to Soviet expectations, the operation was not a walkthrough because the hostage takers put up fierce resistance rather than fleeing, resulting in fifteen more casualties among the captives. The chaos was added when four helicopters were shot down with RPGs and troops of the Revolutionary Guard stormed the embassy. The remaining eight helicopters left with almost all surviving hostages crammed into them while a number of the spetznaz commandos and a few embassy members with military experience elected to stay behind to secure their escape with all the ammunition and weapons that had come with the helicopters. The result was a siege of hundreds of revolutionaries against ~ 45-50 Soviet defenders armed to the teeth. Two of the retreating gunships provided temporary relief by emptying the magazines of their 12.7 mm Yak-B Gatling guns and their missile pods into the crowd storming the embassy, killing and wounding hundreds.

    By the time the politburo’s emergency session commenced at 7:00 o’clock the next morning, the highest Soviet decision making organ was in the civilized, political version of what could best be described as frothing at the mouth. The fact that Iran was known to support the Afghan rebellion and the fact that the USSR could act against this country – unlike against Pakistan, which didn’t border the USSR and was still a US ally – only served to compound the crisis. Besides that, the Soviet government found a perfectly legal casus belli in the 1921 Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship, which bound both parties to: “Prohibit the formation or presence within their respective territories, of any organisation or groups of persons […] whose object is to engage in acts of hostility against Persia or Russia, or against the allies of Russia. They will likewise prohibit the formation of troops or armies within their respective territories with the aforementioned object.” These terms had been violated. About 45 minutes later, after the events of the preceding night and the death of twenty hostages had been described, the politburo unanimously voted in favour of a military response. The Fourth, Seventh, Ninth and Fortieth Armies, all of them stationed close to Iran, were immediately mobilized and the elite 3rd Shock Army was transferred from East Germany (at this point the Soviets didn’t care that it weakened their defences against NATO). In a less than convivial meeting the Soviets delivered a declaration of war at the Iranian embassy in Moscow.

    Half a million men were assembled in the Transcaucasian Military District and the Turkestan Military District, which was detected by US spy satellites. Based on that President Carter decided to go to DEFCON 3, an alert state under which the US Air Force is ready to mobilize in 15 minutes. A carrier croup centred on USS Nimitz was deployed to the Persian Gulf the same day and therefore it was on November 11th 1979 that the Iranian Revolution became a potential Cold War flashpoint. In the meantime, the Soviets attacked in the belief that they could obtain their goals before there could be a major Western reaction.

    The Fortieth Army attacked first on November 12th 1979 and had to cross tough mountainous terrain with the objective of Mashhad, the second largest city of Iran. That proved more difficult than anticipated even though Iran’s armed forces – ranked as the world’s fifth strongest before the revolution – had been purged by Ayatollah Khomeini and despite the fact that Iran could barely get spare parts, never mind new equipment. The Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) was still equipped with Grumman F-14 Tomcat and McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighters supplied to the Shah. The best pilots had been imprisoned to purge the armed forces of the Shah’s supporters, but they were immediately reinstated. They provided tenacious resistance and proved more than a match for Soviet MiG-21 and MiG-23 jetfighters. That ended when Tupolev Tu-22 supersonic medium bombers under heavy escort flattened Mashhad International Airport, including fuel depots and nearby military barracks, with heavy duty ordinance. Mashhad fell on November 16th and its defence cost the Iranians many casualties, particularly among fanatical but ill trained and ill equipped militias, like the Basij. With a ferocity that surprised the Soviets the Iranians launched counterattacks in the shape of human waves only to reap high casualties for negligible gains, failing to dislodge the Soviet Army and failing to realize that this offensive was just a diversion. The Fourth, Seventh and Ninth Armies and the 3rd Shock Army invaded Iran on November 18th. The former two attacked from the town of Ordzhonikidze in Armenia and advanced along the road toward Ahar. The latter two attacked from the village of Jebrayil in Azerbajian toward Ardabil. 400.000 Soviet soldiers along with thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and aircraft completely overwhelmed Iran’s defences in the area. The Fourth and Seventh Armies advanced along the road toward Tabriz and despite fanatical opposition captured the city on November 30th. The Ninth Army and 3rd Shock Army, in the meantime, advanced along the Caspian Sea coast, equally bent on capturing Teheran.

    In the meantime, the situation was complicated even more when Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein opportunistically attacked the Iranian province of Khuzestan to “liberate the Arabs from Persian oppression”. As a response, the United States went to DEFCON 2 for the first time since 1962 (an alert state under which the US Armed Forces can mobilize in six hours time) and landed the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division at the port city of Bushehr. By now the situation was hopeless for the Khomeini regime and the result was his overthrow and execution by the army on December 5th. To hardcore elements he’d become a martyr, but most Iranians today consider him to be a misguided, perhaps even wilfully ignorant fool who sent his country on a clash with one of the world’s super powers with disastrous results. The Iranians had gotten their clock cleaned thoroughly.

    He was replaced as interim President by Islamic scholar, University of Teheran academic and moderate pro-democracy politician Mehdi Bazargan, who had earlier resigned over the hostage crisis. While Kosygin and Carter were heatedly conversing through the Moscow-Washington hotline, both demanding that the other stood down and threatening to ignite a nuclear Armageddon, Iran requested an armistice on December 6th 1979. That eased tensions and led the world away from the brink of nuclear war. It was the closest the world had been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as evidenced by the fact that this is the second and last known incidence of the United States going to DEFCON 2.

    A peace conference began on January 21st 1980 in the Central Asian Soviet city of Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek SSR, and it was attended by General Secretary Alexei Kosygin, US President Jimmy Carter, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and President Mehdi Bazargan of Iran. Honestly though, only the former two had a say in the final fate of Iran rather than Iran itself: Iraq sided with Moscow in the matter while Iran could count on no international sympathy at all. A well known cartoon of the time, published in the Washington Times, portrayed Iran as a child that had misbehaved and had been told by its parents – an anthropomorphized bear and an anthropomorphized eagle representing the USSR and the US – to go to its room while little brother Iraq, in the shape of a cartoon Saddam Hussein, snickered behind his parents. The Soviets refused to budge, leaving a large armed force in northern Iran that nothing but a nuclear strike could destroy. The Americans demanded a Soviet withdrawal, but eventually an arrangement was made that was satisfactory to both. Yet another cartoon somewhat coarsely but not inaccurately described it with the following caption below a cartoon version of Kosygin: “ve get ze top haf, you can hav ze bottom haf”. The Soviets withdrew from everything but Iranian Azerbaijan where the People’s Republic of Azerbaijan was proclaimed. That state was short-lived because it petitioned to “join its Azeri brothers in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” on March 1st 1980. To further compensate the United States and meet their Carter Doctrine, the Soviets declared: “we recognise that the Persian Gulf is vital to the interests of the United States of America and its people The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics shall not allow armed hostile groups or armies to be formed that threaten those interests nor shall it form hostile groups or armies to that purpose itself.” Iraq annexed the province of Khuzestan and in the rump of Iran that remained a feeble democracy remained. This was the Republic of Iran, led by President Mehdi Bazargan, which was pro-American by default for lack of other options. Very soon, however, that would pay off because the US would resume weapons deliveries that had stopped after Khomeini takeover of power. Iran would get the brand new M60A3 main battle tank and F-16 multi-role fighter aircraft to counter the Iraqis. Saddam Hussein turned to the USSR for his weapons and the latter became his main supplier, selling T-72 main battle tanks and MiG-29 jetfighters.

    The Soviet-Iranian War had profound consequences in the Middle East. For one, the Middle East was temporarily divided between Arab nationalists – who were momentarily overjoyed about Iran being neutered – and Islamic fundamentalists, who were infuriated about Western meddling in the Muslim world. The Mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan were losing due to effective Afghan Army offensives and Soviet air and artillery support. There was also the fact that social reform to meet more conservative elements halfway (resulting in an odd mix of Islamic Marxist-Leninism) brought those fighting due to social discontent rather than religious fanaticism into Kabul’s fold. The Afghan Army had secured all the major cities by 1983 and proceeded to secure major roads from there. The major roads were used as perimeters to form enclosed areas, which were cleared of rebels one at a time, major breakout attempts mostly being bombed into oblivion by the assisting Soviet Air Force.

    In 1988 the Afghan Civil War was over for all intents and purposes. By then, the Mujahideen had largely withdrawn to Pakistan. That country would become a breeding ground of Islamic militants along with Sudan where in 1985 Omar al-Bashir staged a coup d’état and implemented Sharia law with the backing of Saudi Arabian billionaire and Muslim extremist Osama bin-Laden. The north of Yemen and parts of Somalia would come under the control of Muslim extremists as well. In due time certain secular Arab nationalist dictatorships would become sympathetic toward these groups.

    A second more immediate result was that Jimmy Carter lost the November 1980 Presidential election to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, an anti-communist hardliner. Through the 1970s, the United States underwent a wrenching period of stagflation, high interest rates, and intermittent energy crises. Events such as Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in August 1974 and the Soviet invasion of Iran in November 1979 contributed to a national sense of malaise and a perception that in both domestic and foreign affairs the nation was headed downward. Jimmy Carter was blamed for the Iran hostage crisis in which the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans, paraded the captured American hostages in public, and burned effigies of Carter. His failure to act decisively was sharply contrasted against the Soviet response, and he was blamed for making America look weak, leaving Moscow in a position to threaten US interests. Carter’s critics saw him as an inept leader who had failed to solve the worsening economic problems at home. His supporters defended the president as a decent, well-intentioned man being unfairly attacked for problems that had been building for years.

    The USSR, in the meantime, saw a change of leadership too, albeit due to cardiovascular instead of electoral causes. What was unknown to the world in the 1970s was that Kosygin was in fact a rather sickly man, no doubt partially caused by the stresses of rule. He was frequently hospitalized and therefore, realizing his own mortality, he created the position of Deputy General Secretary in 1979 for Premier Andropov. In 1980 his health took a turn for the worse and the arrangement around Iran was the last major achievement of his tenure. Andropov acted as de facto leader of the Soviet Union from April 1980 until Kosygin suffered a fatal heart attack on December 28th 1980 at age 76. Yuri Andropov became General Secretary and that made him the first person since Nikita Khrushchev to hold that office in combination with the office of Premier (officially “Chairman of the Council of Ministers”).
     
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    • kurtstallings

    kurtstallings

    Wonderful work

    Engrossing, particularly for someone who came of age in political and historical awareness during this period, and rapidly settled into a fascination for diplomatic and national security studies.

    At the time, I was fascinated by the relegation of Kosygin in OTL to largely ceremonial or cosmetic activities, because he had often been the face of Soviet government in America in the late 1960s, when as a child I had first begun to connect the WW1/WW2 history books I had read into near decomposition to the events on television and radio.

    Only in recent years did I rediscover Kosygin, while researching an obscure aspect of Soviet economics that has become curiously relevant again under Putin.

    Thank you so much and by all means roll on.
     
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