Could the Soviet Union have survived?

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

A Legendary Exposé of the Brutality of the Soviet Union

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

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.

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

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".

Milton Friedman has a good summary on why this happened:

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

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

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.