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WI: The Cold War never ended? What would be the impacts on Pop Culture, Technology, and World Politics?

I think there is probably a way for the hardliners to stay at the helm for another decade and so everything would get steadily worse but the USSR would not outright collapse, it could probably stumble on for decades on inertia and occasional brutality.
 
Death's Companion said:
I think there is probably a way for the hardliners to stay at the helm for another decade and so everything would get steadily worse but the USSR would not outright collapse, it could probably stumble on for decades on inertia and occasional brutality.
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JUST LIKE THE OTHER COLD WAR SUP-

*am tackled to the ground by the low hanging fruit ombudsman*
 
Roger II said:
I think the key issue through this is that for the cold war to never end, you need to do *something* to stabilize the USSR, and that probably in turn means what the "cold war" looks like and US attitudes towards the USSR look very different. So how are we keeping the USSR a going concern?
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The collapse of the USSR was avoidable up until the specific choices made by Gorbachev in the 1985-1988 timeframe. Even then, a continuation of sorts under the aegis of the New Union Treaty remained until 1991.
 
History Learner said:
35% of Russian GDP comes from industry; the energy sector is over stated in Western analysis to be honest.
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But much of that industrial capacity is facilitated by revenue surpluses cause by the oil. The bigger margins on resource extraction make it easier to invest in transit infrastructure and whatnot which are very necessary for an industrial economy.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
But much of that industrial capacity is facilitated by revenue surpluses cause by the oil. The bigger margins on resource extraction make it easier to invest in transit infrastructure and whatnot which are very necessary for an industrial economy.
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Although there was that thing about palleting lacking hinting that Russian transportation lags well behind even before it's air freight ran into a brick wall.
 
I wonder if there's a window for a different Chinese and Soviet leadership going for healing the split rather than opening up to capitalist investment. The USSR has the heavy industry to help industrialize China if they do it at a time where someone can see the worth in developing such a populous ally and also can provide most of the resources China imports today. It's not going to develop as fast as it did by taking advantage of global capitalism's desperate need to prop up the profit margins with cheap labour, with all that implied in turn for China's access to global resources. But it's still going to give the soviets an outlet for their heavy industry fetish which crimped them OTL when they kept it up despite already having gotten what they needed out of that phase of development.

Culture wise, you'd probably see a continued focus on Asia as the main theater of the cold war. You might see a Korea/Japan/Taiwan support boom as the "their guys" in Asia o the "Chinese peril" because I can't see the west taking that enlarged communist block threat well. Instead of a yellow peril pop culture full of Japanese corporations you'd probably have a lot of fiction about a conflict where the front is in Asia.
 
Roger II said:
I think the key issue through this is that for the cold war to never end, you need to do *something* to stabilize the USSR, and that probably in turn means what the "cold war" looks like and US attitudes towards the USSR look very different. So how are we keeping the USSR a going concern?
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Roger II said:
ok now I'm wondering-does someone else just take Deng's place (ie. is Dengism inevitable given the social and cultural development of China in the 70s and 80s) or do we just have a Reverse USSR where it's the Chinese communist regime that goes and the USSR that stays?
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Take everything I say here with a massive pinch of salt because I'm by no means an expert, and I'm just relaying what a friend of mine with much better knowledge of the USSR and China in particular told me when I asked in regards to my Under Twelve Stars timeline.

Essentially the big problem with comparing the Dengist reform of China with any equivalent alternate reform in the USSR is that circumstances are surprisingly completely different in spite of the shared red flags and yellow stars. As he put it, Dengism can be boiled down to doing essentially popular things that were only not done because of the ideological constrains of Maoism whereas any successful form of the USSR is going to instead be doing very unpopular things that weren't done because they were unpopular and the political system completely ossified.

The best way to do this (as in, keep the Soviet system functioning in some recognisable form) is to get Andropov to either die later or begin leading earlier, as Andropov has that understanding of the neccessity of some kind of reform while also being sceptical enough of liberalisation to prevent the kind of Glasnost or Perestroika that would undermine communism. He also has the understanding, unlike many late Soviet leaders, that communism was not inevitable or invincible. His experiences in Hungary in 1956, where he saw secret police lynched in the streets during his deployment, dispelled that illusion for him. In this way he is the closest you get to a Soviet Deng; but again, the comparison stops there because of the differing circumstances.

For Deng, the solution to China's woes was to basically implement most of the policies that developing countries tend to implement to set off an economic boom; the economic liberalisation was largely removing restrictions on what people could do as much as it was accomodating business leaders. For Andropov, "saving" the Soviet Union is much worse for the average Soviet person. You get a tough period of austerity to get public finances in check, including the cutting of wages and other social benefits. The only real plus for "ordinary" Soviet people is that there might be some accomodation of small scale private enterprise; other than that, ruthless political Stalinism and public sector austerity.

In terms of how this relates to the public perception of the USSR; I don't think this kind of path is going to do it many favours, but who knows. Andropov is I think a pretty ghoulish individual like most late Soviet leaders, but it's not impossible to imagine that he might cultivate an image of a pragmatist outside the Union. Overall, though, I think you'd still have that pop culture perception of the USSR as a big bad, especially as the political Stalinism is likely to continue (and the influence of the KGB likely to keep rising).
 
Lilitou said:
Take everything I say here with a massive pinch of salt because I'm by no means an expert, and I'm just relaying what a friend of mine with much better knowledge of the USSR and China in particular told me when I asked in regards to my Under Twelve Stars timeline.

Essentially the big problem with comparing the Dengist reform of China with any equivalent alternate reform in the USSR is that circumstances are surprisingly completely different in spite of the shared red flags and yellow stars. As he put it, Dengism can be boiled down to doing essentially popular things that were only not done because of the ideological constrains of Maoism whereas any successful form of the USSR is going to instead be doing very unpopular things that weren't done because they were unpopular and the political system completely ossified.

The best way to do this (as in, keep the Soviet system functioning in some recognisable form) is to get Andropov to either die later or begin leading earlier, as Andropov has that understanding of the neccessity of some kind of reform while also being sceptical enough of liberalisation to prevent the kind of Glasnost or Perestroika that would undermine communism. He also has the understanding, unlike many late Soviet leaders, that communism was not inevitable or invincible. His experiences in Hungary in 1956, where he saw secret police lynched in the streets during his deployment, dispelled that illusion for him. In this way he is the closest you get to a Soviet Deng; but again, the comparison stops there because of the differing circumstances.

For Deng, the solution to China's woes was to basically implement most of the policies that developing countries tend to implement to set off an economic boom; the economic liberalisation was largely removing restrictions on what people could do as much as it was accomodating business leaders. For Andropov, "saving" the Soviet Union is much worse for the average Soviet person. You get a tough period of austerity to get public finances in check, including the cutting of wages and other social benefits. The only real plus for "ordinary" Soviet people is that there might be some accomodation of small scale private enterprise; other than that, ruthless political Stalinism and public sector austerity.

In terms of how this relates to the public perception of the USSR; I don't think this kind of path is going to do it many favours, but who knows. Andropov is I think a pretty ghoulish individual like most late Soviet leaders, but it's not impossible to imagine that he might cultivate an image of a pragmatist outside the Union. Overall, though, I think you'd still have that pop culture perception of the USSR as a big bad, especially as the political Stalinism is likely to continue (and the influence of the KGB likely to keep rising).
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I would add to this that the way the party in both countries worked was very different. To be specific about what ossification in the USSR means, it means that the party/government had been wholly captured by interest groups like farm/factory managers, local party bosses, and above all the military, and these groups would simply ignore any directives that harmed their interests. It was also impossible to play these interest groups off against each other because their interests were so commonly aligned. Gorbachev's answer to this was try and make the government more transparent and to get the people involved, the theory being that this would break the power of the various interest groups and allow for Gorbachev to implement his other reforms.

By contrast Deng took over a party that had been battered by the Cultural Revolution. This meant three things: the special interest groups were not nearly as powerful as they were in the Soviet Union (it's hard to build your power base when everything is complete chaos), there was a strong mentality of "do whatever the party leadership says", and state capacity had broken down so much that a lot of regional leaders were already trying decollectivization and liberalization purely because the state couldn't handle the economy anymore. Additionally, it was a lot easier to play various interest groups off against each other and so Deng could actually build coalitions within the government to solve problems. Interestingly enough Gorbachev was a big fan of Deng's reforms, and only didn't do that because he realized it wouldn't work.
 
Wasn't a big factor in the collapse of the USSR is that the necessary openness to changing things also meant that people for the first time realized just how truly fucked up everything was and that trust in the state fell even lower and the botched response to Chernobyl and then the August Coup badly damaged government credibility?

Like everyone knew that things weren't going great but the sheer self denial that was stopping serious reforms was also a big part of things being able to creak on. I think the most common USSR survives option Alt Historians put forwards is a Tiananmen Square style suppression of the public disastisfaction buying time to force through painful reforms but this seems to ignore that it was the state itself that didn't want the reforms and the Public were quite apathetic until things reached boiling point. A USSR that keeps just crushing dissent probably isn't going to be able to reform itself because the limited relaxation of the oppression was entirely driven by a desperate effort to get any kind of momentum and public support for change.

A top down approach seems doomed to failure when every level between top and bottom has a vested interest in halting said change.
 
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