An elected position in New York, the Low Hanging Fruit Ombudsman has five deputies: one for each of the boroughs.*am tackled to the ground by the low hanging fruit ombudsman*
Yea, that works re: Stalinist Austerity. I think one other "save the USSR option" is probably like shooting for some kind of peace dividend-type-thing that weakens the army as well. Maybe something like earlier and more durable detente?
Yea, that works re: Stalinist Austerity. I think one other "save the USSR option" is probably like shooting for some kind of peace dividend-type-thing that weakens the army as well. Maybe something like earlier and more durable detente?
I mean, if we just ignore the fundamental argument of Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy that's a perfectly reasonable idea. But if we actually look at Miller's argument his point is that Gorbachev initially tried to do economic reforms, but was unable to because extremely powerful interest groups (Miller lists the energy industry, agriculture, and the military as the big three vested interests) refused to go along. Gorbachev then turned to glasnost and perestroika as a way to get the public more involved and create more transparency so as to weaken the interest groups, but that backfired and killed the Soviet Union. Basically, if we imagine a world where Gorbachev has all the power and can do whatever he wants it's really simple, but once we get into the real world where Gorbachev has a ton of institutional constraints it becomes obvious why he didn't just do that.It's honestly extremely simple to save the USSR, to quote from Gorbachev vs. Deng: A Review of Chris Miller’s The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy:
As oil prices fell, Gorbachev tried to maintain living standards which resulted in major growth in the budget deficit. Before Gorbachev came to power, the budget was balanced or even had a small surplus. In 1985, the deficit grew to 2% GDP, by 1990, it reached 10% GDP. In 1991, the last year of the Soviet Union, the deficit exceeded astronomical 30% GDP (p. 152).The fiscal crisis was partly explained by a collapse in global oil prices but was partly handmade. First, Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign reduced revenues from excise taxes. Second, in order to keep the industrial and agricultural lobbies happy, the government continued to subsidize their inputs and raise prices for their outputs. At the same time, in order to pacify the general public, consumer prices were kept low. Gorbachev also avoided cutting expenditure on public goods and tried to maintain living standards. He decided that–unlike Deng–he would not use force to suppress protesters and therefore tried to avoid the situation where people took to the street to voice their economic grievances.To fund the deficit, the government resorted to borrowing. The foreign debt increased from 30% of GDP in 1985 to 80% of GDP in 1991 (p. 152). As the markets were growing increasingly reluctant to lend, the government funded the deficit by printing money. The official prices were still controlled, so the monetization of budget deficit resulted in “repressed inflation”, increased shortages and higher prices in black markets. Eventually Soviet Union ran out of cash and collapsed.
You either need to have Gorbachev decide to tackle Price Reform first before anything else, as that alone would mostly cover the budgetary hole. He may have to delay his wider reform package as a result, but that works out better because by the time he starts it, oil prices should be rising again.
I mean, if we just ignore the fundamental argument of Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy that's a perfectly reasonable idea. But if we actually look at Miller's argument his point is that Gorbachev initially tried to do economic reforms, but was unable to because extremely powerful interest groups (Miller lists the energy industry, agriculture, and the military as the big three vested interests) refused to go along. Gorbachev then turned to glasnost and perestroika as a way to get the public more involved and create more transparency so as to weaken the interest groups, but that backfired and killed the Soviet Union. Basically, if we imagine a world where Gorbachev has all the power and can do whatever he wants it's really simple, but once we get into the real world where Gorbachev has a ton of institutional constraints it becomes obvious why he didn't just do that.
It's honestly extremely simple to save the USSR...
I think that leaves out a lot of context of what Miller argues, the most prominent in my mind being the fact Miller directly states that by 1990 the USSR was about as deeply reformed as China was/had been. If reform was completely impossible, then how do you reconcile such things?
Because the established interests Miller addresses could have been willing to put up with some degree of reform but not more (such as the sort that occurred in the 90s)?
It isn't reform or not to reform, but also how much to reform and what to reform and what to reform first.
But even if the USSR is saved - that isn't the same as continuing the Cold War. The Cold War was defined by a bipolar world between the two Superpowers, with the USSR have a belt of occupied satellite states and the two sides aggressively competing with one another on the margins (ergo, the Third World which wasn't the US-aligned first world or Soviet-aligned second world ... and the very idea of the third world simply being an 'other' reflects the principally bipolar nature of global politics). The dismantling of the Iron curtain, freeing of the Captive East bloc states, and of hostilities as a more general matter, and emergence of other powers such as China make the firm idea of the bipolar Cold War untenable.
Even if the USSR doesn't implode like OTL - I think it just means a decade or two of it primarily focusing upon getting its own internal house in order before stomping around on the world stage again around the same time Putin started doing so OTL.
The budget cuts the Russian Federation enacted in the 1990s certainly were out of Gorby's means, and Yeltsin was able to achieve them because of the collapse of the Communist Party, through which the three industries previously exercised influence. Price Reform and Gorbachev's historical slate of reforms were acceptable to them, however, with the main check on the former being considerations of popular opinion as it relates to the latter.
If Gorbachev or someone else, say Grigory Romanov, is able to stabilize the position of the USSR, then it's likely the Iron Curtain says up and the East Bloc remains. There might be détente in the 1990s, as the Soviets begin reform efforts, but then later on the hostilities and competition would resume. Sino-Soviet relations were starting to thaw and as Western Power reaches its zenith in the 1990s, it's likely this would accelerate. In a sense, it would be a return to the Cold War of the 1950s, just with the power dynamics between China and the USSR more equal but increasingly leaning more towards China.
I'm skeptical that the USSR even could totally crack down on the Eastern Bloc states. If they tried, my suspicion is there'd be complete social revolt in most of those countries and massive resistance both violent and nonviolent. Poland in particular seems impossible to suppress without a massive commitment to the use of force by the Soviets of a sort that would put a big hole in the the USSR's budget.
East Germany could plausibly be a Belarus-style holdout in the heart of Central Europe, but its being surrounded by more liberal and prosperous countries would make such a regime difficult to maintain. If North Korea of OTL cannot keep people from getting out and others from smuggling media in, how would East Germany of TTL?
This is more or less what I said. Further reforms seem to have required established interests within the Communist party to be gone. I don't see how Gorbachev can rid of them unless he's willing to be a strongman of a sort Gorbachev was plainly unwilling to be.
So it would require somebody other than Gorbachev; and other than that, more or less what I said?
Returning to this relic — a TL on alternatehistory.com once proposed an idea where Brezhnev dies in 1979, leading to Suslov to succeed him before dying in 1982, which leads to Andrei Gromyko being the leader of the Soviet Union from 1982 - 1989, all of this is topped off by Boris Yeltsin succeeding him in 1989.
That could be a possible way to allow the Soviet Union to survive.