What if the USSR wins the Cold War?

[Cutlass]

So was Lenin, but even Lenin produced the NEP. Remember that Kosygin, close to Khrushchev, tried to implement some capitalistic reforms. These didn't include a transition to privatization, but Khrushchev himself encouraged more private plot farming and it isn't unfathomable to imagine some degree of liberalization provided the right conditions.

Besides, the point is to provide a somewhat feasible route for the USSR to win. If they don't reform their economy, they're doomed to fail.

Well, GDP averaged an annualized 5.5% growth during Khrushchev's reign. The system was still full of problems, but the point of this alternate universe is that the USSR is able to by and large fix many of them so far as they could have been fixed.


Story isn't over yet. >.>

That 5.5% can't be called a sustainable rate. That's the rate of taking existing technology and applying it to converting a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial economy. Once full industrialization is achieved, they kind of rate cannot be sustained.


How is it not over? The USSR has ceased to exist. Russia doesn't have it in them to be a new USSR. China is a different scenario.

 

[amadeus]

That 5.5% can't be called a sustainable rate. That's the rate of taking existing technology and applying it to converting a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial economy. Once full industrialization is achieved, they kind of rate cannot be sustained.

Not simply as a result of moving formerly agricultural workers to industrial enterprises, no.

How is it not over? The USSR has ceased to exist. Russia doesn't have it in them to be a new USSR. China is a different scenario.

I meant the alternate timeline. I agree with you; Russia, as a superpower, is done for and has been done for for 20+ years.

 

[Traitorfish]

Not a bad attempt, but Kruschev, while no Stalin, certainly wouldn't have privatised anything. He was still a Communist, after all.

For once, I am in agreement with Amadeus; by this point, the Soviet ideology was something closer to a "broad Fabianism" than any sort of dogmatic communism. (Almost as if to illustrate the point, the noted Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, defected to the "official Communist" camp in the 1930s), so as long as the state controlled the "commanding heights" of the economy, and perhaps some of the loftier foothills, then the state would have retained both its authority and its ideological legitimacy- and that, for a man of the nomenklatura like Kruschev, was the ultimate end.

There are, after all, limited examples of pro-market reforms having taken place in both Hungary and Yugoslavia (the latter case involving a great many so-called "workers' cooperatives", in practice private firms with a limited profit-sharing program), and if two relatively peripheral countries could make steps in such directions, there's nothing to say that the USSR could not have.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

and that, for a man of the nomenklatura like Kruschev, was the ultimate end.

As an interesting aside, Khrushchev tried, with limited success, to dismantle nomenklatura and replace it with purely merit-based appointments and admissions, as well as mandatorily-rotating offices. It was one of the very first things Brezhnev undid.

 

[r16]

my father lived in Bulgaria for 31 years , 14 years of it as a construction worker . State owned part was a the usual 8 to 5 , afterwards he would work on his own , capitalist style . For 3 hours maybe . It was punishable with fines but even the goverment officials used the method as state business was where people kinda warmed up for their own affairs afterwards . Actually this is how we managed to emigrate . He was honest in his work and a Bulgarian moved the permits through the goverment . Instead of a monetary tip or so . Ah yes the celebrated Commie inefficiency . On my mother's side they used to grow tobacco for the state and it has been described as nothing but slavery .

yet when one reads behind the scenes aspects of defence projects , one quickly forgets that the subject companies are in the Soviets . It happens to me all the time , move Mikoyan Gurevich , Sukhoi or like to west and replace it with any other Western equivalent and they will fit in immediately . Defence experts will laugh this off immediately and ask how many MiGs or Sukhois were sold to Western airforces . Will retort and point to one celebrated incident in Paris when the head of a Russian delegation gave a delivery date for nonexistant Flankers and surprising the entire lot of his aides . Dream sales in the honoured mold of American companies . The potential for capitalist endevours was in the system .Afterall USSR was the ultimate in capitalism , where a company owned all .