Hacker News Reader

> especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China

I think it would be much harder to do in the Soviet Union - it was much more ideologically committed to communism than China, such a pivot would probably not happen without major political turbulence.

View on HN

I don't think this is true; it would be hard to compare China with the USSR in 1979 and come away with the impression that the latter was the more ideologically committed country. The PRC at the time was only three years out of the Cultural Revolution and Deng had to tread very carefully to avoid being ousted by powerful left factions in the party that had no counterpart in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com