this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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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).