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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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