Could the Soviet Union have survived?

To me the shocking thing about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (both at the time and in hindsight) was that it was nearly bloodless, with events in Yugoslavia and Romania showing what easily might have been the outcome everywhere. Once it became clear that Gorbachev would not send tanks to reinforce fraternal bonds with the various people's republics, the wheels came off rapidly. But it would be hard to overstate the level of surprise in the region, where memories of 1956 (the invasion of Hungary), 1968 (Czechoslovakia), and 1981 (Poland [1]) were very much top of mind. It was simply expected that attempting to break with Moscow would result in a military crackdown.

I think subsequent events have proven that Soviet Russia had the capacity to retain at least some of its empire by force, especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China. But to his credit Gorbachev decided not to send in troops, and the coup that resulted was too ineptly planned to stick. Gorbachev was a complicated man, certainly no saint, but the decision to let the Soviet empire go merits him a statue or two.

[1] The Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 was suppressed by the Polish army without foreign involvement, but the military junta all but said that the alternative was a Soviet invasion. Whether or not this is true is actively debated in Polish historiography, but was universally believed at the time.

I think it would have been very unlikely for a number of reasons, but specifically two main ones:

- The Soviet Empire never transformed into an assimilative empire and was always something of a post-war occupation state. If you look at other empires that managed to last longer, they almost always had an “absorbing” of the captive areas, adopting some of their cultural ideas, incorporating local elites into the state apparatus, etc. (think of the Romans in Greece, for example.) This didn’t really happen in Soviet member and client states and was more of a top-down promotion of particular individuals and parties.

- The existence of Poland. Soviet history really goes back to Russian Empire history, which includes the partitions of Poland and the numerous uprisings for independence during the 19th century. I don’t think it was ever realistic to think Poles would be happy in a Russian empire, and the continual existence of such a large, unhappy client state in the Soviet sphere seems like it was an inevitable weak spot. The Solidarity movement was key in bringing down the USSR, so that is essentially what happened.

The west could have kept the Soviet Union alive. The Soviets were poor and an easy adversary to plan for. After witnessing what occurred in the 1991 Gulf War, they realized the writing was on the wall. The Soviet or Russian military would never be able to match what their "main adversary" had just demonstrated, a major ground incursion that took only a few days. 30 years on and over a trillion dollars of military spending, and Russia is still not capable of defeating one country in a three year struggle, and in the process destroyed most of its incompetent force.

Their top level domain (.su) has mysteriously survived...

The hard part of counterfactuals is that the result of a counterfactual is often an entity that shares only a name in common with the real historical entity. Could the Soviet Union have survived? Sure, maybe, if it didn't look anything like the Soviet Union that actually existed. Could the Chernobyl accident have been avoided? Sure, if the reactor hadn't been designed for better weapons production, if the crew hadn't been pushed to perform an unusually risky procedure, or if the crew had the initiative to avoid the problems they encountered. But the Soviet Union that actually existed was overly militarized and had a culture where obedience was more important than safety, and if it didn't have those traits then it wouldn't have been the Soviet Union that actually existed

There are a lot of ways to break crowds up into 2 groups. One of them is the people who believe reality is more important vs. people who are convinced that The Narrative is more important. Really interesting debate - the narrative people are usually right and they certainly have the numbers but when the reality people have a point it is rather overwhelming. Narratives cannot overcome economics.

This article seems to be a narrative person's perspective. Once the Communists gave up control of the media, blam. Game over. The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water. People do make reference to their actual real-world experiences when pushing for change in government.

> In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I just struggle to accept that Gorbachev was being intellectually honest with this one. Is that really where he assigned the blame? The USSR had real economic and legal problems. The US had spent decades showing up just how bad Soviet policies were.

It's a shame for the sake of memes that they couldn't hold out long enough for a Unicode flag emoji

  <Multi_key> <c> <c> <c> <p> : "\xe2\x98\xad" #symbol representing proletarian solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers

I see a lot of retrospective know-it-all attitude. There are many alternative scenarios.

Gorbachev could have acted more skillfully.

"Deng Xiaoping thought Mikhail Gorbachev was an idiot."

A more competent new edition of Brezhnev could have prolonged the misery for a few decades.

Related:

A Legendary Exposé of the Brutality of the Soviet Union

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566387

When Lenin stepped off the train in his return to Russia in April 1917, he was probably the only person in Russia who thought Russia would be run by socialists within a year - the other Bolsheviks certainly didn't. They were working to support Kerensky.

Russia's economy was about the size of Brazil's at the time, and he said socialists would go into a holding action in Russia while the real socialist revolution happened to the west.

From the perspective of its inception, there was no failure in the Soviet Union, the failure was in the revolution in Germany.

Jury is still out on if the Russian Federation can survive in one piece for any length of time imho

The Soviet Union was first headless in 1975. After Brezhnev's stroke, he was no longer fit to govern. The people in the back room — mostly Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB — ran the country by favor-trading and bumbled their way into Afghanistan.

But the mistakes started earlier. The arrest of Khrushchev in 1964 may already have been the point of no return. When you are faking the procedure, at least you retain some possibility of belief in democratic — or at least bureaucratic — principles. But when you just arrest the leader one day, the illusion is broken. Nobody can really believe you anymore.

The Five-Year Plan of 1965-70 — the Kosygin reform — was a success by almost all conventional economic measures [1]. Growth improved, innovation occurred, wages went up. But it was reversed. Some people in the party didn't believe that it was Marxist enough. Brezhnev, having come into office how he did, could never have had the courage to demand some kind of pragmatism that could have led the Soviet Union to the transformation that China underwent just a few years later. A nation can't be run like a mob, with everyone looking over their shoulder to see if they're going to be taken outside next. It paralyzes decision-making.

So when Brezhnev had a stroke and could barely even perform the superficial functions of leadership, nobody even wanted the job. Surely, if Khrushchev could be ousted from his position for his drunkenness, Brezhnev's incapacity should have been more than sufficient. Andropov, the leader of the KGB, was effectively calling the shots at that point, and when Leonid finally kicked the bucket in 1982, it was indeed Andropov who took over. But isn't it telling that for seven years, Andropov could have easily become the leader of the world's second-largest economy and simply didn't want to? What does that say about his confidence in the system he was running?

By the time Gorbachev was in the chair there just wasn't anything left to save. You can't have a vanguard-party government without a functioning vanguard party. The multi-party systems have all proven more resilient because when one of the parties starts to malfunction, it is removed from power and has the opportunity to reinvent itself or be replaced. No single-party state has lasted longer than China's current run, which is also starting to show a few cracks.

So far the two-party system in the United States has avoided the notionally unlikely situation that both parties become highly dysfunctional at the same time. But I don't like the news these days.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform

From any realistic humanitarian perspective, the fall of the Soviet Union was a horrific crisis that resulted in untold amounts of human suffering and poverty. Russia spiraled into a terrible mess, celebrated by the West.

Perhaps worth noting, shortly after the fall around 1991, Yeltsin hijacked the Russian government and prevented Communists from retaking power. The pattern of events immediately after the fall (and their strong support from the West) raises an eyebrow about how exactly the "collapse" was precipitated.

Yeltsin used self-anointed emergency powers to abolish the Constitutional Court and dissolve parliament. When the people protested, he ordered a military attack on parliament, killing hundreds and jailing hundreds of protesters.

Yeltsin seized control of all broadcast media, banned opposition publications, and permanently outlawed 15 political parties. He ordered assassinations of his political opponents, parliamentary deputies, and journalists.

Yeltsin illegally dissolved the Russian constitution and replaced it with one that gave himself nearly absolute power over policy.

By 1996, he was losing badly in his bid for re-election. A communist candidate was far in the lead.

During re-election, his administration was bankrolled to the tune of $10B by the IMF and World Bank. Even so, he was still trailing the communist candidate by a long shot. So, he threatened civil war, making it clear he would not relinquish power. About half of the country thought there would be a civil war if the communists won. Ultimately, he rigged the vote count, as reported by ABC news in the US.

When he won re-election, Bill Clinton famously lauded the event, saying Russia has "turned its back on tyranny".

I think China is proof that it could have survived if it had followed similar policies and allowed private enterprise to run in parallel to the communist system.

No centrally planned economy can survive in the long term. Resource allocation is so skewed that it kills such systems. No free market pricing means that economic decisions aren't taking into account the costs. Even in USSR with the vast mineral wealth this couldn't save them.

Milton Friedman has a good summary on why this happened:

https://www.npr.org/2006/11/16/6498016/friedman-on-free-mark...

(2020)

It's a tough question. After the fall of the Soviet Union, living conditions in Russia became much worse. The brief period of liberal democracy didn't work out. (Very like the Kerensky period in 1917). Trying to transition to postmodern capitalism did not work out well at all. Then Russia got oligarchs and the Russian mafia, which was basically the old national security state privatized. More recently, Putin crushed the oligarchs and started a war.

Arguably. Russia's most successful period since the mid 19th century was under Communism.

The Soviet Union could have survived if a central political power had survived, but by the late 1970s this was becoming impossible. The collapse of the USSR resembles the collapse of many states that are overtaken by oligarchs, and the oligarchs were gaining power long before the USSR collapsed, though they were called Apparatchiks and had somewhat different roles, and less freedom-of-maneuver than the true oligarchs that emerged in the 1990s. But by the late 1970s the largest industrial powers were consolidating into a single bloc that would be able to defy the Politburo, and so Gorbachev had to worry about a coup the entire time he was in charge, and he was never able to push through the reforms that he knew were needed.

I'll post here a long excerpt from the best book on the topic.

The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy:

Mikhail Gorvachev and the Collapse of the USSR

By Chris Miller

©2016

Page 181-183

The only force that proved strong enough to break the military-industry-agriculture coalition that dominated Soviet politics was the collapse of the Communist Party - which in turn caused the dissolution of the Soviet state. Until mid-1991, the three economic lobbies were bound together by interest, ideology, and inertia. Had Gorbachev been able to divide the coalition partners, playing one interest group against the others, he might have had more success in asserting control over the Communist Party and the Soviet state. But a strategy of divide and rule proved impossible. So long as they dominated the Communist Party, and as long as the party controlled the state, these groups’ shared interests overwhelmed any tactical alliance Gorachev could have conceivably offered. In the years after the collapse of 1991, with the military divided and discredited by the failed coup, and with industry and agriculture writhing under the pain of inflation and depression, Russian president Boris Yeltsin finally managed to split the groups, co-opting much industrial support while slashing farm subsidies and cutting military funding. Even though the Soviet Union by then no longer existed, however, Yeltsin still faced several years of resistance in his attempt to break the lobbies’ stranglehold on the federal budget and on the central bank. Only after Yeltsin shelled parliament in 1993, pushing the country to the brink of civil war, was the military-industry-agriculture coalition finally destroyed.

Was the Soviet Union simply unreformable? China’s experience proved that there is nothing inherent in Marxism-Leninism, in autocratic political systems, or in centrally planned economies, that makes a transition to a market economy impossible. In the USSR, to be sure, decades of wasteful investment left the country a burdensome economic inheritance. Yet the most damaging legacy of the command economy was not economic inefficiency, but political sclerosis. The Soviet system proved unreformable not because its economic problems were insurmountable, but because it entrusted vast political power to groups that had every reason to sabotage efforts to resolve the country’s economic dilemmas. In part, this situation was the result of the USSR’s relative wealth. When Deng took power in China, for example, the country’s farmers were on the brink of starvation. No matter what Deng did, the state of China’s countryside could hardly get worse, so China faced no built-in lobby that opposed change. By contrast, the USSR was stuck in a politically induced middle-income trap: many Soviet citizens, especially among the elite, lived decent lives that were threatened by change. Whereas Chinese farmers embraced decollectivization, Soviet farmers - who had benefited from several decades’ worth of farm subsidies - found that Gorbachev’s agriculture policies offered risks as well as rewards. A similar mechanism obstructed change in Soviet manufacturing and service enterprises.

Economic efficiency was also restrained by the relative leniency of the Communist Party during the postwar period. Under Stalin, the party had few interest groups because the Soviet dictator enforced his writ through purges and mass killings. Enterprise managers dared not miss production targets, on pain of death. The rapid rotation of cadres, facilitated by Stalin’s purges, reduced the influence of patronage networks. Brezhnev’s policy of “stability of the cadres” ended the use of the firing squad to encourage effective management. That made the Soviet system more humane, but it degraded incentives to work efficiently. Bureaucrats and managers now faced few reasons to act effectively: their firms could not go bankrupt, their salaries did not depend on performance, and they received promotions based on political connections. In China, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s had shaken up the party and the bureaucracy, cutting back the strength of interest groups and paving the way for Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the 1960s and 1970s saw patronage network and interest groups solidify. Gorbachev inherited a system in which economic lobby groups played a larger role than ever before. Yet his powers as head of the Communist Party were weaker than any Soviet leader since the Bolsheviks took power in 1917.

They were clinging to an idiotic economic theory for decades after Xiaoping already told the Chinese to get rich again so no.

Yes if it were putin.

How much imaginary food are we hand waving in for this thought process?