"Five Ways the Soviet Union Could Have Won the Cold War" Topic

"In 1969, a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik wrote an essay called "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" It predicted the demise of the Soviet system, most likely in a conflict with China. Amalrik, as it turned out, was wrong about a war with China, but he was only off about the end of the USSR by a few years. No one took Amalrik very seriously at the time; I was assigned his book, like most young graduate students in Soviet affairs, primarily to critique it. Today, people with almost no memory of the period accept the Soviet collapse as just another inevitable historical moment.

But did it have to happen? Could the Soviet Union have won the Cold War? Or at the least, could the Soviet Union have survived until today, and remained a viable competitor to the United States while celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, or the centennial of the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 2022?

Counterfactual history, the game of "what if," is an intellectually hazardous exercise. No one can really explain what didn't actually happen. And in any case, why bother? Maybe the Persians could have beaten the ancient Greeks; maybe Columbus could have taken a wrong turn and been lost at sea; maybe the first atomic bomb could have been a dud and convinced everyone to go back to the drawing board. But the Persians did lose, Columbus did make it across the Atlantic, and the Trinity test did light the sky with nuclear fire. It would take a lifetime to imagine the alternatives, none of which are real…"
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Amicalement
Armand

That's a LOT of maybe's and what-ifs.

For my purposes(i.e. Space:1959 campaign), the first one-no '38 purge and a early removal of Stalin works for me. Better to go with a Red Napoleon.

I can write tons of stuff about it…but I guess there were 2 ways to go through – Stalin-like (or N.Korean way) and Chinese way.
One is 1984 but with much more resources than NK has – so if you keep your population in information vacuum you can survive as state – unhappy one, though.
Chinese way in fact was started during NEP (New Economic policy) in 20s…may be if we had Lenin for longer, and were able to get rid of both Trotsky and Stalin…oh well, too many "if".
In 1980s a small possibility to save SU came with Andropov…but he was too old and too ill for fast changes.
I don't think socialist world could have beaten the west economically…unless somehow we had an alliance between SU and China.

They did not lose the cold war, they lost the peace…the economy and did not adapt 9 like the chinese did).

I think perhaps, Kruschev was right………

True enough, Barin. The NEP was (still is) the great unknown. Would the USSR ended up like China, just a whole lot sooner? Interesting intellectual exercise, that…

Or they could wait 25 years until an American President does it for them. Putin's Neo-Soviet Russia has more Political and Economic power than the former Soviet Union.

Hi Barin, I thought that Trotsky was more pragmatic than either Stalin or Lenin, wasn't it him that forced War Communism onto the Bolsheviks, which is effectively a similar limited capitalism as the Chinese adopted? I always thought that if he had gained control of the Soviet Union it would have become a hybrid Socialist-Capitalist state as China is these days.

That said, it was a long time ago that I studied the Russian Revolution at school….

Tim

Trotsky was a strong believer in International, and export of revolution. He was the one supporting military help for European revolutions, but Russia had its own problems at the time of Finnish, Hungarian and german uprisings.
he was a talented military commander, but economy was hardly his strong point.
War communism was not a capitalism, but, well…communism of a kind, with exppropriation of "extra" resources from "rich". The closest candidate for Chinese-style way was probably N.Bukharin.
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