In Defense of the Red Army

[kato13]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I wonder if the Soviet Union could have survived, or even thrived, had it instituted Chinese-style economic reforms starting in the early-to-mid 1980s....

This might be the most realistic explanation for an extant, strong USSR in a T2k timeline.

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IMHO lots of things work against this.

Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by kato13

IMHO lots of things work against this.

Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).

I think those are all fair points, but if, historically, China was able to overcome most of those same obstacles, I don't see why Russia couldn't too.

Re port cities, Russia alone had Murmansk, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Novorossiyk, and Vladivostok. That's not a lot of major commercial ports, compared to China or the USA, but the Baltic States and Warsaw Pact nations would add a few more to that list.

Re ethnicities, I'm not sure if that would hinder free market reforms to a prohibitive degree. China has approximately 100 million people belonging to ethnic minorities and still managed it. If the Soviet gov't could force its ethnic minorities to accept an inefficient command economy for half-a-century, it could probably coax them into partaking in a hybrid economy. Enjoying a Big Mac every once in a while might help some Soviet citizens to forget how oppressed they are politically. Bread and circuses...

Re paranoia, pride, isolationism, etc- certainly, those would all be obstacles to meaningful economic reforms, but perhaps a Soviet regime, facing a truly existential looming economic crisis, could get past such psychological and cultural barriers to assure the survival of the state/empire. Mao wasn't exactly an internationalist. Even though most of the PRC's effective economic reforms post-dated his demise, China still had to overcome centuries of suspicion and outright hostility (300 years of Ming Dynasty isolationism, the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, etc.) towards foreign commercial interests.

For at least the last two decades of the Cold War, the Soviets were open to western products; the problem was, they couldn't afford them. Pepsi entered the Soviet market in the 1970s. The Soviets didn't have enough hard currency to buy much cola, so they traded alcohol and other agricultural products for it. In the most extreme example, the Soviet gov't even traded a handful of soon-to-be-scrapped warships to PepsiCo in 1989.

https://warisboring.com/the-cola-fle...-largest-navy/

McDonalds opened its first location in Moscow in January of 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the USSR. Lines for the grand opening stretched for blocks. And who can forget Gorbachev's cameo in a 1997 Pizza Hut commercial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3jA0SVtyUE

Given these historical precedents, I can see a Soviet government, desperate to save its tottering economy, embark upon a program of PRC-style market reforms in the 1980s and '90s. This wouldn't need to spark the kind of economic boom that China achieved IRL during the first decade of the 2000s- it would just need to be enough to keep the Soviet economy afloat until the Twilight War kicks off in the mid-1990s.

Corruption would be the biggest obstacle, IMHO. The government would need to adopt some serious semi-independent self-regulating mechanisms to weed that out. If doing business with the West was seen as a way to save the Soviet empire, Moscow would have a strong incentive to do so.

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[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by kato13

IMHO lots of things work against this.

Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).

China is also exceptionally corrupt, but they are corrupt in different ways.

The Chinese would court foreign investment, the foreign company/companies would move money into a China to build a factory in China to build widgets in the factory. The Chinese would keep the factory running on the 2nd and 3rd shift and sell the product under another label (and/or replicate the factory). In the end, the Chinese got factories and goods out of the deal.

The Russians would court foreign investment, the foreign companies would move money into Russia, and the Russians would steal the money. In the end, Russian government and mobsters (and government mobsters) got money funneled into Swiss bank accounts out of the deal.

Foreign capital investment also had a ~20 year head start in China, and it was in the West's best interest to prop up China as a bulwark against the USSR while it was in the best interest for the West for Russia to partially collapse.