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No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.
Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.
But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.
Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.
The independence movements of non-USSR Warsaw pact countries was written on the walls, no hardliner could have managed those. With those revolutions kicking off its impossible for me to imagine there SSR’s not following suit.
But they in fact weren't, except for the Baltic states.
Why do you think Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania weren’t bound to happen?
I was commenting on the SSRs of the USSR, not the other Warsaw Pact / COMECON member states.
? I think you have misread my first comment then.
I don't think I did. You stated:
"SSR" is an abbreviation for a member state / republic of the USSR. And there's no evidence that they followed suit, with the exception of the Baltic states.
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No, it wouldn't. Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge, the Soviet Union was running into the debts it had incurred to reality - no amount of will can overcome the demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology. You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.
It was over. Gorbachev was merely more deluded than most, in thinking it could be reformed. The hardliners that wanted to keep the Union together had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation.
Hitler was beaten by the Allies, not by domestic opposition. He absolutely could have held on longer if he hadn't declared war on the Soviet Union and United State. There was no western plan to invade the Soviet Union if it weakened to the point where an invasion might succeed.
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I'd say that has been a usual characteristics of many regimes throughout history, and yet most of them didn't crumble in spectacular fashion as the USSR did as a result of Gorby's decisions. Also, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos should have all collapsed a long time ago according to your logic, and yet they didn't. Burma and the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia aren't that different either.
Again, none of these are that uncommon anywhere.
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Just reform the industries? It really isn't that hard, China did it and they were coming off a poorer base. The Soviets could've cut the astonishing amount of military spending to free up resources for the civilian sector and waited for oil prices to rise again. That alone would've been enough to get out of the danger zone.
Gorbachev was a world-historical blunderer, he had no idea how the Soviet system actually worked and lacked the power to effectively implement his insane reforms. People don't actually know how shambolic he was, they have this vague notion of glasnoist and perestroika but no concrete facts of what specifically he did:
https://x.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1790224622694387726
With what capital, exactly? With what technologies, from the West?
China bootstrapped their industry with technology transfers and capital investment - from Americans. 'Just reform the industries', like it's easy. Reduce the military budget, as if the military was not its own fiefdom hostile to its own diminishment.
As far as I know, the foreign investments that accompanied Deng's economic reforms mostly came from enterprises in Taiwan, Hongkong, Indonesia etc. that were owned by local Chinese. American investments started happening much later. It's not like nobody was going to invest in the USSR.
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The Soviet Union had plenty of capital and technology, they produced their own working space shuttle in the late 1980s. Their capital was just misallocated and inefficiently used due to the socialist system and expansive military posture. If they began proper market reforms conducted in a mature and sensible way, then they could've developed the necessary industries internally, regardless of foreign investment.
There was no voice that came down from the sky that said 'you must let any well-connected official steal directly from your country's capital base', that wasn't inevitable. It was a policy choice.
Gorbachev didn't understand politics, he was dreaming. You have to bring stakeholders onboard if you want to reform the system. He needed to control the military to secure his position before doing anything. Khrushchev was able to reduce the size of the Soviet military by about 1/3 because he had the necessary skills, Gorby did not.
I'll nitpick that Gorby in fact wanted to reduce the Soviet Army's manpower, but this was actually happening simultaneously with the introduction of various types of new equipment, which meant an increase in military spending. Most of the Russian military tech that is in service today is derived from types that were introduced in this era. This shouldn't have been a problem in itself, as it is normal to replace equipment that is obsolete and rusting away, but it was happening at a time of economic collapse.
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Uh huh. Funny that you should use the Buran as an example, because it was a bad copy of a bad idea.
There's a lot of nuance hidden in the 'proper market reforms' and 'mature and sensible way'. Sensible to who? Who would bring about these sensible reforms, when the temptation to just copy the West - what they have always did - would have been omnipresent? By the time the Soviets could manage a few hundred creaky clones of IBM mainframes, people were playing Wolfenstein. They were twenty years behind in silicon, in the defining technology of century, and they had neither the time or the capital to catch up.
All of their existing industrial base was old. The tooling was bad. The workers were unproductive. It could not make enough to satisfy the domestic market, much less compete with the west. They could not export their way to prosperity because the only thing the West wanted from the Soviets was their raw, material resources. You could say that the average Russian worker removed value from the steel and aluminum they worked. No one drives Ladas anymore, do they?
All of this capital misallocation happened because they were communist. The reforms that hypothetically, pie-in-the-sky would have saved the Soviet economy would have made them not communist. No one could have saved the Soviet Union, because the time for saving it was 10 years before Gorbachev ever came to power. They had no Deng, and they had no American technology transfer. The Soviets knew that they needed to reform but were unable to do so until it was far, far too late.
You keep saying that the Soviet Union had to abandon communism. I agree. Communism doesn't work. Do you know who really believed in communism? Gorbachev, lord of the blunderers. His reforms sought to create a democratic socialist state, to go back to this idealistic vision of what Lenin wanted, what communism was supposed to be. He and his reforms were totally detached from reality.
A bare minimum of what's needed in a reformer of the USSR is someone who can admit the need for a market-based system while retaining political stability and not inviting looters to rob the country. That's not such a big ask. By proper market reforms I simply mean things like 'let state-owned firms reinvest their profits while preventing executives from siphoning off all profits for personal gains'. This is basic stuff that Gorbachev didn't manage to do. A little bit of anti-corruption and party discipline work would've gone a long way!
The Soviet Union routinely imported technology from the West and America specifically, all throughout its history. And they routinely created technology of their own. The USSR was not a third world nation like you seem to think, it was an urbanized and industrialized economy. They did not need to get rich with export-led industrialization like China, they were in a far better position than China in the 1980s but completely dropped the ball.
Gorbachev himself imported huge amounts of high-tech goods from the West, causing significant balance of trade problems and debt as he tried to modernize Soviet industry. The problem was never a shortage of technology but a lack of proper market reform.
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I’m not absolutely sure about this, and I could be proven wrong, but I think people misunderstand China. I think China is a genuinely Marxist state that looked at the Soviet Union, and decided that they hadn’t properly done the first Bourgeois revolution. So they decided to go back, do the first Bourgeois revolution, and then have the second revolution later. I think that second revolution is about to happen soon.
Yeah Orthodox Marxist economics says that the revolution can only happen in the most advanced capitalist economies, you can't skip stages with this heretical Leninist Vanguard Party nonsense. They were looking to Britain and Germany, not Russia for revolution.
China is unclear. They might be trying that. Or maybe Marx comes second to nationalism and development for the sake of national strength. I highly doubt that they want to do away with the state though.
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Did you know that in your grandfather's time a single Stalin was enough to genocide 5 million Ukrainians? Today 50 Stalins is barely enough to make a cutesy point in an Internet argument, this is known as Stalinflation.
Vote comrade Roman Pavlik for First Secretary to bring us back on the Steel Standard, and restore the value of our nation's Stalins. Make the capitalist pigs pay the Iron Price!
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This is my take too. Every time that the ruling class is sufficiently cruel, they win. If the tanks rolled into Tallinn like they did in Prague and Budapest, then any resistance movements would have been crushed.
Venezuela today is a mess compared to the USSR in 1990, but Maduro is still in power. So are the Kims in North Korea for that matter.
Contrary to the idea of "the harder you squeeze, the more of us will slip through your fingers", ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to a long reign, provided that you can't be toppled by an outside power.
But if you get soft, and can be shamed, then a million revolts will grow.
You can still be crushed by your own iron fist if it mutinies. This normally looks like a military coup (see Roman Emperors passim ad nauseam) but the Russian Revolution (February and October) is also an example.
Maintaining political control of the military is a hard problem. The reason why democracy overperformed in the 19th century and dramatically won the 20th century is that maintaining political control of the type of military needed for industrial age warfare without neutering it turns out to be easier under democracy that other forms of government. This is also the tl;dr of Why Arabs Lose Wars - Arab armies are designed to be incapable of staging military coups, not to be capable of defeating Israel.
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Bangladesh just now is a good example, the military didn’t want to fight a civil war and so told the Prime Minister they’d be switching sides, then she fled. They were of the opinion (likely accurate) that the new regime could be made amenable enough to them. You need the military to be scared to really put up a fight, and often civilian leaders can’t manage that.
For the Soviet example, it’s questionable whether the red army was willing to roll back through to Berlin in 1989 to put down the whole thing, country by country. Honecker wanted them to, but that doesn’t mean it would have been easy, even if a hardliner had been in charge. In addition, at least some of the KGB elite did well out of the collapse, so the incentives were muddled there too.
You can be assured that there was not one higher-level officer anywhere in the Soviet armed forces willing to start shooting in order to keep the Warsaw Pact / COMECON together in 1989.
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