this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Make sure that Khruschyov, Gorbachyov, Yeltsin, Kosygin, and Liberman have nothing to do with the politics and the economy of the USSR.
Resume the project of transitioning to a 6-hour working day.
Gorbachev was a teenager in 1950. You'd be better off making sure he got a better political education than he did, though really his problem was just that he was a likable, competent bureaucrat who was also a completely uninspired dumbass when it came to leadership so he let his policy get written by anticommunist extremists. Without Khrushchev's dumbass failures and revisionism, without Brezhnev's failure to correct course, without Andropov's early death, and without longstanding systemic rot that allowed a large liberal bloc to form and give everyone the dumbest brainworms possible, Gorbachev would just be some friendly party official competently carrying out what he was told to do.
Taking out Khrushchev's bloc is probably the single most decisive thing: without their liberalization reforms and general revisionism the Soviet economy continues growing rapidly, the Sino-Soviet split probably doesn't happen, and without China opening up as a base of labor and a market for capital from the US the US hits a hard wall in the 1970s with no solution to maintaining capitalist growth.
I fail to see how that makes him harder to deal with.
Firstly, what makes you think that the issue was education and not him becoming a lib in spite of it?
Secondly, if it was, indeed, education that was at fault, what would you change, then?
He was quite literally a liberal self-admittedly dedicated to destroying the USSR by the time he got the position.
He was an anti-communist PoS.
I wouldn't be so sure, considering that there was the whole rest of the colonial world to exploit. It would just be more dispersed, I'd wager.
Oust the liberals from academia and also prevent the dumbass spiral towards liberalization caused by Khrushchev's bloc's reforms and the tacit acceptance of the "second economy" that the post-Stalin USSR had. Without all those conditions he'd just be some guy.
China was unique in that it had a massive well-educated population and at least some infrastructure ready to go, while primarily lacking industrial capital. It was basically the conditions of post-war Japan on a much larger scale, and the incorporation of Japan into the US economy as a colonized industrial base was basically the same phenomenon decades earlier: a way to increase the US's overall material wealth in consumer goods without the cost of scaling up production domestically.
The opening of China as a market had an even bigger effect and came at an even more opportune time, however, because it happened right as American industrial capital was aging and needed to be replaced anyways, and as a lot of local labor pools were almost fully utilized. That is, American industry was running up against material barriers to further expansion and was coming up on costly replacements and upgrades, and China solved both of those: with a huge pool of educated workers, lots of room for new development, and an eagerness to buy fresh industrial capital, it became possible for American industrial companies to get larger factories with more workers than they could have had in the US for the same cost as upgrading their existing factories, or to shift some of their production entirely to Chinese companies and just serve as middlemen.
In short, they got a cheaper investment that cut their ongoing costs and increased their supply, enabling rapid growth and letting them avoid the wall of full-exploitation that they'd run up against. There really wasn't any other place that could offer the same benefits at the same scale as China.
And without the recovery of the US and the seeming wealth in consumer goods that outsourcing to China enabled, a generation of Soviet students don't get the dumbest brainworms ever by mistaking American colonial plunder for some sort of secret magic efficiency of markets.
How would you determine who is a liberal and who is not? Also, you are risking ousting too many liberals there (consider the fact that people who already live well and want even more - like highly educated scientists, engineers, or famous performance artists - seem to be rather likely to be liberals) in the sense that ousting them would leave you with too little an educational and research, outputs.
How? What actions would you take?
I hadn't considered that part.
Yes there probably needs to be some kind of political class purge, but the general population was exhausted from purges, rapid industrialisation, and then WW2. The USSR needed to stop trying to match the US militarily and rely on nukes for defence rather than an insanely big and expensive conventional force. Invest those resources into culture and raising living standards instead.
I'm not saying 'kill them'. I think that banishing them from the party forever would be enough.
This was exactly what they did, liberalised, and as we can see it ended up with cornboy in seat.
This would be suicidal mistake. It would very quickly led to the point where US would proxy warred everything (whacha gonna do russkies, nuke us to defend some place in Asia?) and it USSR would be quickly in point where they would have to choose either use the nukes or don't and both answers would meant its destruction.
Maybe just push the communism button outright if that's such a great idea?
I know that's what Kruschev tried to do, but he went about it in the worst possible way, so I don't think his failure is proof that the aim was wrong. What would you say the alternative was?
And wasn't the bloated conventional military one of the primary reasons for the economic stagnation of the 70s? Most of those forces were just standing around waiting for an invasion that never came, and it never came because of the nuclear deterrent. Even in Afghanistan the USSR didn't really utilize its professional forces, they used conscripts instead - let alone in the various proxy wars
Liberalisation predates Khrushchev, Stalin started it and Beria continued with Malenkov. For example huge mistake was not discretely sidelining Zhukov when his looting came to light, since he was really the hinge of Khrushchev's coup. What should they do? Imo listen to Zhdanov, as he was essentially correct (which future proven greatly). Also they shouldn't trust west, should help Greece and trust Tito more.
The invasion did came multiple times, but not openly (it would be openly if Soviet army was weaker, nukes were MAD only in theory for most of that time) and was defeated each time. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Afghanistan, not counting all other proxy wars. If any of those were lost now you would be cursing Soviet leadership why they weren't better armed. Again back to fundamental error of not treating the west like west treated them.
From what I gather, the major factors for that were the unwillingness of the post-Stalin leadership to slow down industries in the short term in order to modernise equipment, as well as Kosygin and Liberman's reforms (which also contributed to the lack of modernisation of industrial equipment).
Molotov or Malenkov would have likely pursued the same policies as Stalin, but with the understanding that some things did need to change - just not in the ways that Khrushchev did. They would never have denounced Stalin, they never would have gone the route Khrushchev did with his market reforms, and they wouldn’t have given liberal intelligentsia so much leeway as he did.
I'd be shocked if Stalin had ever even heard of Yeltsin in the 50s.
I have heard of Yeltsin, and if I were to be transported into the body of Stalin in the 50s, I would act on that knowledge.
”Never let this random construction worker into the party. Trust me, it's essential for the future of the Soviet nation.”
police sketch hanging on the wall of every party office
Unironically me.
Oh, I wasn't being ironic.
I don't believe in great man theory, but I still think everything would've turned out better if these few naive liberals had never become politicians.