Gorbachev survives

[uk 75]

The coup organised by conservative elements in Mosvow against Gorbachev ultimately led to his humiliation and replacement by Boris Yeltsin.

Gorbachev had many faults not least his failure to deliver economic reforms that would improve the lives of people. But he was a more effective and professional politician than Yeltsin.

Had there been no coup Gorbachev might have worked with Bush and Kohl to deliver a more controlled and less chaotic transition from the Soviet Union to a new group of independent states.

Yeltsin would still have been a thorn in his flesh as Russian Federation leader but Gorbachev enjoyed good personal relations with Bush and Kohl.

Gorbachev unlike Yeltsin had an understanding of a plural society and might have avoided the chaos which hit Russia in the 90s and led to Putin.

He might also have preserved Russia's relations with Ukraine and Belarus and allowed these countries to remain linked.

The Confederation of Independent States (CIS) might under Gorbachev have emerged as an effective replacement for the Soviet Union.

A key test for Gorbachev would have been the Yugoslavian breakup in the 90s. His partnership with the West might have reassured Serbs of his support but encouraged them not to embark on repression and genocide.

Relations with NATO might have developed.along the lines of greater Russian cooperation balanced by a respect for the CIS as a regional power.


Equally, history finds a way of bucking attempts to change it. Gorbachev might have proved to be as ineffectual as Yeltsin and a certain Vladimir Putin might still have emerged to restore Russia to its former greatness.


Soviet era defence programmes might have survived under Gorbachev if he had maintained some degree of political cohesion. Naval and air forces might have worked more closely with the US and developed accprdingly.

 

[topspeed3]

This is pretty certain...Gorba was not a one eyed kgb agent.

 

[Archibald]

- Don't split with Yeltsin in 1987-88 (Gorby humiliated him, to the point he atempted suicide before trying the Russian card in 1990)
- Beware of KGB members like Kryuchkov and Boris Pujo
- New Union was on track by 1990

I often think Andropov had doubts about Gorbachev from the beginning. Before he died in 1984, Andropov buried a few "moles" inside the KGB. Kryuchkov was one such ticking bombs. And it blew in August 1991.

New Union Treaty - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

By 1989 Vlad Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany. When revolt blew up in November 1989, he watched a furious mob ransacking Stasi HQ nearby. He was shitting his pants, fearing KGB offices were next target. So he called Moscow for support - only to be told no support would come. Putin never, ever forget what he considers a betrayal.

 

[uk 75]

There were no "furious mobs" in Leipzig in 1989. That orderly German men and women of all ages walking and chanting peaceful slogans should terrify a poorly trained Putin says volumes for his current fears about Ukraine.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Gorbachev was a wrecker and there's no real redeeming him tbh. Yeltsin was an actual drunkard who killed people with mismanagement.

The only endgame Gorby would have had was the destruction of the USSR, whether by nationalist uprising, or by tax base collapse, or something else. It was kind of inevitable when you have a machine built like that. Keeping the USSR together would have been a monumental task and something like the New Union Treaty was merely loosening the screws. This is bad in a society which relies on tight screws to hold itself together. Remember that the USSR legally allowed for secession. The dissolution of the USSR was not seriously fought because it was legal.

The undoing of the USSR began with Khrushchev in earnest and merely culminated 40 years later. It's a bit complicated, but it has to do with a lack of Stalinist-style purges, missing the boat on a potential transition to a Chinese-style market economy, and internal bureaus fighting each other over every little stupid thing like the OGAS. Purges, i.e. firing most SSR's CPSU staffs and replacing them with Muscovites and native loyalists, would solve more than half of the problems but not all of them. Boris Pugo would be the archetypal "good Communist" for leading an SSR in this case. Absolutely no loyalties to anything besides the Party, the Central Committee, and the State.

The USSR was ultimately built on the foundation of anti-nationalism, or internationalism, but it doesn't matter how you call it. As practiced by the USSR that meant loyalists from the ethnic SSRs, trained in St. Petersburg and Moscow and steeped in the Communist ideology, would periodically replace home-grown rulers. Periodic purges would be done wholesale to identify potential troublemakers, loyalists, and the like, and in the aftermath of sacking and firing of political leaders you'd replace them with people who would respect the big man. This probably should have happened in the 1970's at the latest, as the SSRs of the Baltic and West Ukrainian peoples were in the process of an awakening of national consciousness.

By the 1980's, the nationalist awakening was simply more successful than the types seen in Canada, Switzerland, and Britain at the time, securing the dissolution of the USSR by enacting the secessionist clause in the Soviet Constitution after a decade or so or agitating for it. Gorby still gave saving the USSR a very half-hearted go, just about twenty years too late, in Baku and Riga.

The end game of the New Union Treaty would have almost certainly been dissolution pushed back three or four years. The last time for serious talks about genuine internationalism was the 1960's and I. Dziuba was shot down quickly by the CPSU, arrested, and his work banned. It was a bit too late for that.

You'd need a Tienanmen style thing, plus a small to medium sized civil war, to keep the CPSU in power.

The time to change, besides not putting Khrushchev in power, would have been the early to mid-1970's, and that would have probably been an assault into Western Europe rather than any actual reshuffling of the political apparatus, because of the then-recent defeat by the U.S. in Vietnam and the relative nadir of Western militaries at the time, but I guess Brezhnev thought the West was close to internal collapse or something. Then it rebounded and he died from the shock of the news.

Keeping the USSR alive beyond the Cold War is a tough cookie, because it collapsed for a lot of reasons which were literally decades in the making, and ultimately began before the Russian Civil War had finished. It also collapsed for very transient reasons, which were products of a system that had little real change but its operators merely believed it had changed, and no one had the savvy to do otherwise.

Besides simply being another Stalin, which was beyond his intellectual and political prowess, there's not much Gorby could have done to keep the machine working. Because it had been transmuted into a machine that only worked well with an incredibly powerful and incredibly clever executive leader in charge, lest it descend into chaos, there was little chance of changing the machine while it was still running. The "NUT" was supposed to fix this...somehow. It wouldn't have because the SSR's grievances were partly exaggerated and partly moral rather than practical, so any change would have just led to more demands for change.

No one after Stalin, except maybe K.U. Cherenko, who died before he could be blamed for any problems, was clever enough to helm it. While there's precious little a dead man can do to steer the ship of state, Cherenko was smart enough to dodge the duty, which suggests a highly attuned political mind for the era.

Also, the "terrified Putin" was a highly speculative extrapolation in a narrative historical article from The Atlantic, not anything real. I doubt Putin felt anything besides resignation and vague sense of unease about the future. The mere economic realities of the Yeltsin era are enough motivation to not go back, which the author of the Atlantic article clearly forgot that but probably because they didn't ask anyone who was there.

The current European kerfluffle has more to do with some hot takes based on Twitter polls than anything else AIUI.

tl;dr Gorby wasn't a Stalin, and the USSR had been so thoroughly reorganized by the Great Purge that it didn't work without a Stalin, so yeah.

 

[uk 75]

Thank you for such a detailed response.. A lot to consider.

My speculation was more along the lines that Gorbachev might have avoided the carpetbagger capitalism of the Yeltsin years.

 

[Hood]

It was all falling apart by then. Corruption was rife, he could never have resisted the forces that led to hypercapitalism, corrupt Communist and KGB officials buying up share stocks in mineral and hydrocarbon stocks at a song and making billions in profit as a result. The economy was bound to tank with the dislocation caused by the break up of the USSR and it was failing already so its hard to see an easy way out.

It took billions of Euros to get Eastern Europe stable and reoriented to a free market system. Russia didn't have that luxury, they had to sink or swim using their own resources. Nobody was offering them a good deal.
I doubt that Russia could do what China did - too much corruption creaming off, too much alcoholism in the workforce, poor quality control and outdated facilities that need rebuilding, labour still not as cheap as in East Asia plus Germany had all the cheap labour it needed in former Eastern Bloc nations on its borders, geographically industry was spread too thin and Russia lacks good access to international shipping routes (ironic given Crimea's importance in this regard).

Even in traditionally good areas of Soviet economic strength, for example, shipbuilding, things collapsed like a deck of cards. Despite churning out merchant ships, Russian yards never held up any better against South Korean and Chinese shipyards than any other Western nation. Even today China's aviation sector is heavily reliant on production of Airbuses and other Western types plus shareholdings in Western companies of light aircraft while its own airliner programmes have been very borderline successful. Yet in 1991 Russia on paper had an aircraft industry that could have gone toe to toe with the US but it couldn't because its avionics and engines lagged far behind. A lot of re-re-engining projects emerged but lack of capital and willing buyers scuppered that. Even Antonov in Ukraine struggled to get profitable production runs going. Russia just wasn't ready and US industry could smother any competitor (in fact Boeing smothered its internal competitors, who knows they might even kill themselves off yet!).
Maybe if Beria's economic reforms had come to life in 1953 then maybe things might have been different. But that's a lot of maybes.

 

[uk 75]

Another excellent contribution. Thanks.

"Nobody.was offering them a good deal". I think this may be what I had in mind. Gorbachev had a strong relationship with Chancellor Kohl. The former GDR was closely integrated with Russia. Perhaps Gorbachev and Kohl could have done more business together.

 

[Hood]

I remember late 1980s books like Martin Walker's The Sleeping Giant that seemed to imply that the Soviet MIC making washing machines etc. on the side was creating a parallel military-controlled economy that would somehow create a high-tech industrial basis that would remodel the entire system. Western observers, despite visiting the USSR, seemed unable to fully grasp that factories meant to be building MiG-31 parts instead making washing machines on the side was not an asset but a sign of how far things had collapsed. Factory managers were chasing roubles off their own bat, not GOSPLAN directives by that time.
I mean would any economic analyst have seriously viewed things like "BAe Warton is making microwaves instead of the EFA Programme" or "The Electric Boat Division is making $40 million a year selling Jacuzzis" as good things? I very much doubt it.

Funny you should mention Kohl. I seem to remember an argument (it could have been the same book, maybe another) that claimed that the USSR should grab any large loan offered by the FRG, commenting that if the Soviets defaulted on the repayments that there was little the Germans could do to enforce payment! Again it feels like the author's strongpoint really wasn't economics.

I'd argue Kohl had too much on his hands rebuilding the GDR to lend much of hand to Gorbachev. And German industry preferred carpetbagging Polish and Czech/Slovak assets as they were nearer (within easy reach of the autobahns).

 

[Yellow Palace]

I mean would any economic analyst have seriously viewed things like "BAe Warton is making microwaves instead of the EFA Programme" or "The Electric Boat Division is making $40 million a year selling Jacuzzis" as good things? I very much doubt it.

When I was a graduate, I talked to the manager of the light metal shop in a UK shipyard. His team had designed steel honeycomb kitchen units, which he believed had a market, and was unhappy that his bid to make dustbins for the local council had been dismissed as far too expensive, since it was burdened with overheads.

The response of the company's management to his entreprenurial efforts, I never witnessed.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Thank you for such a detailed response.. A lot to consider.

My speculation was more along the lines that Gorbachev might have avoided the carpetbagger capitalism of the Yeltsin years.

"Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow," was actually very clever in the long run tbf. The carpetbagging was bad but it did result in the exposure of oligarchs to V.V. Putin's later ultra savvy political machinations, and served as a useful tell for the most loyal of them, which setup the current system. Oligarchical capitalism, just without the Communism and pan-Slavic union confederation, tbh.

Anyway it forced a lot of the republics to overextend themselves, like Tatarstan and Chechnya, which were then crushed by the Federal troops in the wars, or muscular negotiations, and the old internal Soviet borders retained.

One of the biggest economic problems was Gorby's anti-alcohol campaign tbh. This resulted in a large loss of taxable income in the treasury by the mid-1980's that was irrecoverable, monetarily speaking. It got recovered through increasingly politicized and barter-based B2B transactions. A lot of the increasing imports of Western products like McDonald's and Pepsi/Coca-Cola thus were done through promissory notes and percentages of random surplus profits, like the scrap ship soda deal.

This is probably one of the most significant economic issues, honestly, even if it just shows how out of touch with the working class that Gorbachev was. Had Gorby raised taxes on alcohol instead, or established a NEP-type system of profiteering through private small stills, it might have carried the USSR a few more years. OTOH, this is partly what resulted in the hyperinflation and failed Pavlov reforms, which were just attempts by the Ministry of Finance to squeeze a few bloody rubles from the stone of the Soviet people.

Then again, even if Moscow says "do this," there's plenty of reason to suspect that the Union Republic leaders just won't, and start conspiring with each other to enact the secession clause simultaneously...

Thus, the main issue would still be squishing the nationalist uprisings in West Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltics. The Central Asians were also mad, so if it had survived the inflation then maybe the Union just squeaks by into 92 or 93 to the post-ODS oil squeeze, but loses Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Tajikistan to ethnic war and radical Islamism, etc. Yeltsin is put out to pasture in the ethanol fields and Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan are retained, maybe a couple others but those are the biggish ones.

That said, besides Boris Pugo and maybe Yananev, I don't think anyone in the Gang of Eight was really smart enough to do this.

Pugo was too much of a bulldog to really lead a country, a sort of living weapon who needs to be pointed at the enemy, but he had the right sort of mentality to keep the Union intact: crush subversion with motor riflemen and main battle tanks, figure the rest out later. Unfortunately by the '80's the entire project had been completely hollowed out intellectually in favor of Communist idealism. Gorbachev was just the symptom of this rather than the cause.

More importantly, none of that may be possible with the people who were both alive and capable of leading the country at the time.

Gorby's cuddling up to the West was ultimately disastrous, and if he had steered the USSR into a much harder anti-Western bent, it might have survived in a diminished form. Even the least informed Soviet people were aware that they needed a Margaret Thatcher more than they needed a George Bush.

 

[zen]

In demographic terms what data can be trusted suggests even before Gorbachev came to power, a major population decline was coming.
Russia has suffered huge 'bites' out of it's population over the last 100 years and from the 60's onwards the birthrate was not rising but falling.

Quality-wise the education system was screwed up by Communism and not producing enough high skilled to offset population falls.

So it's rather pointless to talk the short-term economics if you know long-term a century in the making disaster is coming.

Gorbachev failed in outreach to the West to secure the Russian future.
Yeltsin certainly didn't and likely this contributed to his decline.

Even if by some miracle you hold the USSR together, you're looking at a potential population change as various minority ethnics out produce children....

 

[uk 75]

My question is not whether the USSR could have survived but if a Gorbachev led Russia might have faired better than it did under Yeltsin and could have avoided Putin

 

[zen]

My question is not whether the USSR could have survived but if a Gorbachev led Russia might have faired better than it did under Yeltsin and could have avoided Putin

I'd say that's difficult due to the nature of Communism permeating everything in the USSR.
The transition was always going to be a shock and humiliating.

We might think it better that no Hitler or Mussolini arose. Putin is much more a Mafia Don.......although the other parallel might be Hafez Al-Assad.

Yeltsin for all his flaws got both the nature of Western Democracy and the need for personal courage.