I just watched the series on the BBC by Adam Curtis called Trauma Zone, and I feel part of the reason why the USSR collapsed the way it did was partly based on the naivete of Gorbachev himself, being born in the Soviet system, living his whole life inside it, where as previous leaders had at least some experience of another political economic system. I just wonder if another type of leader like Andropov could have salvaged the situation?
It was those “other types of leaders” who has screwed it all up in the first place, so it’s unlikely they would have been better at fixing the problems.
Another leader would have either had to make similar reforms, and take the similar risk of hardliners working against him, or he would have had to continue just ignoring the problems. Ignoring things might have let them drag on a few more years, but then the collapse would have been both a bigger surprise and probably more damaging.
The Soviet Union limped along for decades pretending that everything was fine. Absent Gorbachev’s attempts at reform and the hardliners failed coup, there’s no reason that they couldn’t have continued their slow decline for a few decades more.
Probably, North Korea (for example) demonstrates how bad off a regime can be and still cling to power. That doesn’t mean that it would be especially functional, just that it would continue to exist. There’s also the issue that a fanatic hardliner might well have decided to take the world with them if they decided saving the USSR wasn’t possible; in which case it would have been destroyed in a nuclear exchange and even worse off than in OTL.
Gorbachev in my opinion probably did about as well as could have been done with the hand he’d been dealt. He inherited a mess not of his making, and was mainly just unlucky enough to be the one left holding the ball when matters came to a head, and was unwilling to become Stalin Mark II to hold everything together at gunpoint.
Andropov was so elderly that his health failed 4 months into his administration. He lived another year, but was pretty useless the whole time. His successor, Chernenko, was equally frail and useless after just a couple months in office. The mostly headless bureaucracy just bumbled along under both men.
There was nobody in the Soviet Union in the mid-late 1980s who was both a) young enough to be vigorous and b) old enough to have ever lived as an adult in pre-Leninist times under pre-Leninist political / economic systems. Further, pre-Lenin Russia was hardly a valid example of how to run a successful economy or polity in the 1980s.
My larger question is what does “salvage the situation” mean to you? Reinvigorate Communism? Replace it with [whatever]? Etc. What government or economic system would you propose had you been magically placed in Gorbachev’s spot as a vigorous middle aged person?
I think this is the key. It’s also proof that, contrary to their “domestic consumption” bluster, there really aren’t any countries out to attack them. If the USSR/NATO cold war had been an actual hot war, the USSR would not have lasted long. Same goes for North Korea: the only thing that saved them was foreign assisance, especially military units.
I’d say yes. The communist regime in China was looking at many of the same problems the Soviet regime was looking at. Gorbachev looked to revitalize the Soviet regime by allowing some political freedom. Deng looked to revitalize the Chinese regime by allowing some economic freedom while continuing to crack down hard on any political dissent. I believe this is the reason why the communists are still in power in China but not in Russia.
In fact, while Andropov and Chernenko were essentially senile figureheads for most of their short reigns, Leonid Brezhnev was essentially a functionary selected because he wouldn’t attempt the kind of ‘radical’ internal reforms that Nikita Khrushchev attempted after comprehending that the Soviet industrial system was fraudulent and failing. The Soviet Union didn’t fail because Gorbachev was in charge; it failed because it had been failing since the post-WWII period (and arguably before), and Gorbachev just acknowledged that reality and tried to institute economic reforms that might have made the Soviet Union marginally competitive except for the fact that it was already heavily dependent upon the petroleum economy right at the point that crude oil prices crashed, and it lacked the internal industry to competitively refine and ship petroleum products. The drains of (their) Afghanistan war, the 1986 Chernobyl #4 uncontained meltdown, and their investment in the ill-advised Buran shuttle (and other space weapon) programs further bled the already bankrupt Soviet economy dry, but collapse (or at least massive contraction) was inevitable. Modern day Russia has subsisted on selling poor quality excess armaments and natural resources for pennies on the dollar, which temporarily brought in hard foreign currency but it has no real industry (even their military industry is basically 1950s technology and they are suffering from a lack of viable workforce).
Gorbachev clearly hoped for integration in what was already becoming the globalized economy, rather than propping up Cuba in exchange for sugar and trying to extract oil and minerals from their eastern ‘republics’ using foreign-bought technology, as well as limiting the growth in spending on strategic weapons programs that were often failures and even when demonstrating successful capability were not of any fiscal or actual strategic benefit. Gorbachev ended up allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to “go their own way” in what became known as the “Sinatra Doctrine” under the thesis that the political costs of maintaining authoritarian control were not worth whatever economic benefits the Soviet Union received from its East Bloc client states (which in the case of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany were significant). History shows that Gorbachev was correct in the broad strokes but not in the details, in which ‘ideologues’ within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fought against him. Gorbachev was ultimately thwarted in his ambitions, and his successor, Yeltsin, was undermined by the NATO powers from without, who were distrustful of his motives. The selling of all industries and access to resources to oligarchs, stripping Russia bare of all real value, and the rise of Vladimir Putin as the king of a rat kingdom is the inevitable assessment history.
The “Communists” in the Communist Party of China are so in name only. There is nothing in what they are doing that is in accord with Marx and Engels, or Mao. They are just run of the mill bureaucratic authoritarians buffering the cult of personality around Xi Jinping. In fact, the reign of Deng Xiaoping and his successor have essentially mapped out the post-WWII American model for global trade domination and economic development but accelerated and compressed into three decades.
Stranger
Which does bring us back to the question of “what do you mean by ‘survive?’”. They don’t have much ideological continuity with the past; but they do have organizational and in many ways personal continuity. If the goal was “sustain the communist revolution” it was a failure, but if the goal was “stay in power while keeping China a functional state” it worked fine.
In the same way, “could the USSR have survived in some form” and “could the USSR have survived without radical ideological and economic changes” are two different questions.
What’s “OTL” mean in this context?
I’m not him, but I think it’s “Our Time Line.” As distinct from alternative timelines where different futures unfold. Seems to be a term of art in the alternative history community
Yes, this; didn’t occur to me someone else might not know it.
I will say I too didn’t recognize it at all. I puzzled it out pretty readily though from context while reading your post yesterday, and only resorted to Googling this morning to generate a cite for @Pleonast’s benefit.
The thing is, it wasn’t just limping along. There’s a credible theory that the stress of dealing with Chernobyl is what really finally pushed them so far that it was reform or die. Anyone who was leading the USSR at that point would have had to deal with the same issues. As bad as North Korea is, they’ve never faced a crisis like that, that credibly threatens the survival of a huge part of their country, not to mention the rest of the world.
There are some notable parallels between the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, including being a diverse, multi-ethnic state dominated by one ethnic group, famines (planned or resulting from bad science and imposed ideological beliefs, internal power struggles resulting in top level regime chances and erasure or repudiation of the previous regime, spending an inordinate amount of GDP on ‘strategic’ or vanity projects while the population experiences pervasive poverty) but ultimately China recovered from WWII and its post-war deprivations while the Soviet Union never really did. China, of course, did not suffer from a massive nuclear meltdown with global consequences, invest extravagantly into competing with the NASA space program, or had to deal with NATO on the border of its buffer states, but it also made a choice in the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties to deconflict its political objectives (i.e. dominating the East Asian sphere and reintegrating the ‘lost’ territories of Taiwan and Hong Kong) with its economic development.
I don’t think this really had anything to do with ideology per se but rather pragmatism; the Chinese ended up co-oping the Western powers to become the manufacturing powerhouse supplying them first with cheap goods and later technological manufacturing at a cut-rate prices—essentially engaging in and winning a covert economic war—while the Soviet Union (and later Russia) never really recovered or developed much industry post-war except for arms manufacturing. This was probably aided in China’s case by never being in a direct existential conflict with the Western nations, and really having ended their open proxy wars with the Korean conflict (although China has been buffering and supporting nations against the West all over Asia and Africa as those opportunities presented themselves), We can only speculate about “What if?” scenarios, such as what if Khrushchev and Kennedy had come to an early détente and opened up the Warsaw Pact to Western economic development in the early ‘Sixties instead of both nations spending massive amounts of money on their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, but I suspect the Soviet system, entrenched in centuries of cultural paranoia about outsiders and insecurity over never really having been a European colonial power would have likely rejected those alternatives. Certainly, by the time Gorbachev ascended to power, the track was already laid down and the most he could do was pull back on the throttle, but not redirect the entire Soviet economy and political system to a more liberalized and ultimately competitive entity. I doubt anyone could have done better without also dismantling the Soviet system and Warsaw Pact.
Stranger
The Soviet Union faced challenges China and North Korea didn’t, namely the revolt of the Warsaw Pact countries…
In 1989 .Poland had formed a non-Communist government under Lech Wałęsa. In short order Hungary opened its border with Austria, East Germany fell apart. By the end of the year, Vaclav Havel was elected Presidenmt of Czechoslovakia. While Ukraine and Belarus nominally stayed loyal to Moscow, both the Balkan and the Caucasian states wanted independence.
Stalin and Zhukov together couldn’t have saved the Soviet Union from that pressure on its western front.
I’d still like the OP @Ryan_Liam to return and tell us what they think success at “salvage the situation” means to them.
That’s the thing; it is about ideology, because ideology and pragmatism are diametrically opposed. China largely abandoned its old ideology by deciding to act more pragmatically. The USSR didn’t and suffered for it.
Maybe someone here might remember something I’m hoping isn’t a fevered dream of mine. I recall reading something written by an American in the 1950s arguing the Soviet Union would never go to war against the United States. The author believed the upper leaders of the Soviet Union would collapse due to infighting and the Warsaw Pact countries couldn’t be trusted not to do their own thing. I don’t remember if he made any arguments about the economy.
A lot of people argue the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable, but I think most of us were surprised when it happened. I don’t think the CIA predicted it, but I can’t help but think Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and knew radical changes had to be made and they had to be made quickly.
Would the Soviets had been able to limp along like South Korea? I don’t think so. Unlike SK, the Soviets had a hegemony to maintain and part of the problem is they could no longer afford to maintain it. They either had to let those countries go their own way or be prepared for a war that probably would have destroyed the Soviet government.
It’s a matter of hind sight. Now that we know what was really going on in the USSR, we can say a collapse was inevitable. But at the time, we had the entire apparatus of the Soviet state doing everything they could to keep accurate information out of our hands. That made it a lot harder to make good predictions, so the collapse caught us by surprise.