To me the shocking thing about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (both at the time and in hindsight) was that it was nearly bloodless, with events in Yugoslavia and Romania showing what easily might have been the outcome everywhere. Once it became clear that Gorbachev would not send tanks to reinforce fraternal bonds with the various people's republics, the wheels came off rapidly. But it would be hard to overstate the level of surprise in the region, where memories of 1956 (the invasion of Hungary), 1968 (Czechoslovakia), and 1981 (Poland [1]) were very much top of mind. It was simply expected that attempting to break with Moscow would result in a military crackdown.
I think subsequent events have proven that Soviet Russia had the capacity to retain at least some of its empire by force, especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China. But to his credit Gorbachev decided not to send in troops, and the coup that resulted was too ineptly planned to stick. Gorbachev was a complicated man, certainly no saint, but the decision to let the Soviet empire go merits him a statue or two.
[1] The Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 was suppressed by the Polish army without foreign involvement, but the military junta all but said that the alternative was a Soviet invasion. Whether or not this is true is actively debated in Polish historiography, but was universally believed at the time.
It was not bloodless and Gorbachev did send tanks and army into breakaway republics [1][2][3], the soviet union was simply too weak to do anything to stop the movements to break away from Russia. Russia even lost the war with Chechnya in early 90s, which shows just how weak they were. It wasn't until the west helped rebuild Russian economy (mostly based on fossil fuels) that they were able to revive their imperialistic ways under Putin.
Unwinding a communist system is incredibly difficult and always yields a collapse in living standards, although temporary. Less extreme forms of it are often called "shock therapy" for this reason, but Russia's transition was handled especially badly and was especially extreme as the dissolution of the USSR wasn't a planned event.
If you look at opinion polls, a significant fraction of the Russian population does wish for a return to the Soviet system. You will also find some nostalgia in the former DDR. This isn't because they thought it was a perfect or good system, but the memory of the collapse and return to market competition is painful, and of course some of them are naturally left leaning anyway and liked a world where there was no competitive pressures.
Yugoslav nostalgia is very popular as well, so much it has a name: yugonostalgia. The movie Underground[1] by acclaimed director Emir Kusturica is a fabulous study of this phenomenon and a fantastic movie on its own.
Indeed it's always amusing that whenever the Western media talks about Russian political opposition to Putin they almost never mention the Communist party despite it's consistently strong polling.
Back to Putin - I see him as harking back to pre-communist Russian empire days, rather than the Soviet Union per se.
So he is in the same camp as people in the UK who are nostalgic about the British empire.
> especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China
I think it would be much harder to do in the Soviet Union - it was much more ideologically committed to communism than China, such a pivot would probably not happen without major political turbulence.
I don't think this is true; it would be hard to compare China with the USSR in 1979 and come away with the impression that the latter was the more ideologically committed country. The PRC at the time was only three years out of the Cultural Revolution and Deng had to tread very carefully to avoid being ousted by powerful left factions in the party that had no counterpart in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.
I think it would have been very unlikely for a number of reasons, but specifically two main ones:
- The Soviet Empire never transformed into an assimilative empire and was always something of a post-war occupation state. If you look at other empires that managed to last longer, they almost always had an “absorbing” of the captive areas, adopting some of their cultural ideas, incorporating local elites into the state apparatus, etc. (think of the Romans in Greece, for example.) This didn’t really happen in Soviet member and client states and was more of a top-down promotion of particular individuals and parties.
- The existence of Poland. Soviet history really goes back to Russian Empire history, which includes the partitions of Poland and the numerous uprisings for independence during the 19th century. I don’t think it was ever realistic to think Poles would be happy in a Russian empire, and the continual existence of such a large, unhappy client state in the Soviet sphere seems like it was an inevitable weak spot. The Solidarity movement was key in bringing down the USSR, so that is essentially what happened.
The Soviet empire was very much assimilative, so successfully that people sometimes overlook it. Its greatest leader was Georgian, while three others were Ukrainian. Parts of it ("Western Ukraine", Kaliningrad) were annexed outright after World War II, while other areas continued a Russification program that started under the tsars.
As for Poland, the Solidarity movement was quite effectively suppressed in 1981 and ceased to be an effective political force until the Polish government badly miscalculated and allowed it to reconstitute itself eight years later. The biggest mistake the Soviets made in Poland was in giving a large degree of autonomy to the Catholic Church.
All of those areas other than Kaliningrad were assimilated primarily during the Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union.
As for Solidarity, I suggest reading about its influence on the Soviet bloc as a whole. Again, even if it didn’t work, it was just another example of a resistance movement in Poland. Another one would have likely occurred a decade or two later.
Western Ukraine was pre-war Poland; the population was resettled to settle parts of Germany that were annexed to Poland post-war.
This is part of several massive ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin so successful that we forget about them today. But you are right that there was substantial continuity between imperial Russian and Soviet policy around russification of the various provinces.
With regard to Solidarity, there were plenty of resistance movements in Eastern Europe over the years; the real shocker around its 1988 incarnation was that it was allowed to peacefully assume power, and the Soviet Union didn't impose a red line enforced by tanks. That was new! It wasn't the return of Solidarity so much as Gorbachev openly saying "we're not going to intervene" that got the process of collapse rolling.
Well, personally I don’t forget about them because I actually have some Lemko ancestry, which are the group of people that got moved.
Again I don’t think as a whole the Soviets really did a great job assimilating cultures outside of historically Russified areas. Maybe they just didn’t have enough time to do so, but more in a broad geopolitical sense, I’m not sure it ever would have worked.
I see the process more in line with how China handles being a multi-ethnic state. You have a dominant ethnicity and a pretty aggressive program of settling people from that ethnicity in the provinces. If you were a Russian engineer or doctor, you had a fair chance of being sent to Kishinev or Almaty or somewhere else in the empire; conversely, bright up-and-comers in the provinces would have a chance to come to St. Petersburg or Moscow. The Soviet state, like the PRC today, took care to advertise its many ethnicities while making sure as a practical matter that Russia would be the dominant power.
I think you have to be careful excluding "historically Russified areas" in your evaluation, because then that kind of begs the question. Those areas didn't just russify themselves! I agree that the process happens on longer time scales than the Soviet Union lasted for, but I think they continued a quite successful tradition from Tsarist times, with the added help of extremely aggressive and mostly forgotten ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin, like the removal of the Volga Germans.
Maybe another way to put it is: the Russian empire was reasonably “successful” (not actually good, ethically, IMO) in assimilating areas that had a stronger tie to the historical Eastern Orthodox core of the Moscow state. Tie also meaning the expulsions you mentioned. They had a more difficult time on the borders of and outside this zone. (Poland, for example.) This continued into the Soviet era.
A good metric of assimilation might be the alphabet. Seems to me that if the imperial core is using one alphabet (Cyrillic) but outlying areas with a hostile history are using another (Latin), then the assimilation process wasn’t working and perhaps never would work. And more broadly this alphabet difference is really a religious-cultural difference going back a millennium.
In short, IMO the Latin-using Catholic Poles had a long history of being different from the Cyrillic-using Orthodox Eastern Slavs, and were large enough as a group to not get relocated or assimilated, and therefore basically never would have been properly assimilated into the Russian-dominated Soviet identity.
Litigating this is like arguing about whether George W. Bush was a southerner. He was a Connecticut blueblood who grew up in the South, made his political career there, spoke with a southern accent, married a southerner, and so on.
The war with Ukraine has made questions of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity much more salient then they used to be, but it's important not to project that onto the past. The situation with Khrushchev and Brezhnev is a lot like W's—they grew up and made their political careers in Ukraine; Khrushchev in particular had a strong southern accent.
Аnd if you absolutely insist on blood tests, then you'd have to count Gorbachev as half Ukrainian, which would be a further bit of proof about the effectiveness of assimilatory policy...
Khrushchev in particular had a strong southern accent.
You can take the matter up with his granddaughter if you like:
I remember my grandmother saying that Khrushchev spoke Ukrainian all the time and that it was so embarrassing because it wasn’t the real thing! That said, Khrushchev was a Russian. It’s erroneous to say that he was Ukrainian—as Henry Kissinger just did, in a recent article. He did not transfer Crimea to Ukraine because he was Ukrainian. He was a Russian.
The west could have kept the Soviet Union alive. The Soviets were poor and an easy adversary to plan for. After witnessing what occurred in the 1991 Gulf War, they realized the writing was on the wall. The Soviet or Russian military would never be able to match what their "main adversary" had just demonstrated, a major ground incursion that took only a few days. 30 years on and over a trillion dollars of military spending, and Russia is still not capable of defeating one country in a three year struggle, and in the process destroyed most of its incompetent force.
> Russia is still not capable of defeating one country in a three year struggle
the counter-factual is that ukraine survived primarily due to western aid, without which they'd be defeated already and is more likely to have to adapt a gorilla war against russian occupation.
A Desert Storm equivalent would have won the war before any substantial aid could arrive. The fact that the US could carry out such an operation on the other side of the planet, and Russia can’t even do it on its own border, really casts doubt on this idea of Russia as the world’s second military power.
Things like Desert Storm involve 1,000s of casualties. It seems more likely that it wasn't an operational failure as such but more that the Russians didn't expect resistance and were aiming for a repeat of their Georgian invasion [0] with direct casualties around the low hundreds mark.
It seems probable that the spirited resistance the Ukrainians offered and the level of western intervention that has been observed were what threw the Russians off and they are more strategic factors. When it became clear that there was going to be a real conflict they immediately started mobilising a much bigger force than they started with.
There isn't really that much evidence of Russia's military power either way yet, the fog of war is too thick. There were catastrophic mistakes in their planning assumptions though.
The actual Desert Storm had about 1,000 casualties on the coalition side, of which about 350 were killed. Lots on the other side, of course. But Russia barely seems concerned about casualties on its own side, let alone among the enemy.
Even if your theory is true, that they didn’t anticipate a “real conflict” and so didn’t bring the necessary forces, that’s still a catastrophic military failure that speaks poorly of their martial prowess. That stuff is part of military power too. A big army you can’t apply effectively doesn’t win any prizes.
I wonder if even the Georgia invasion would have been possible in modern times with everybody wielding a phone and connected to the internet. I feel like they used to get away with it a lot more easily when it was less visible. E.g. also all the other previous interventions in the eastern bloc.
> The fact that the US could carry out such an operation on the other side of the planet, and Russia can’t even do it on its own border, really casts doubt on this idea of Russia as the world’s second military power.
Russia can claim that title (or at lest 3rd place) solely based on its nuclear weapons program.
We’re getting a vivid and ongoing demonstration of just how limited that power really is. For anything short of a threat to the existence of the nation, they don’t do much for you. But if you’re trying to throw your weight around, “don’t get in my way or I’ll end the world” just isn’t a practical threat.
I think you're mistaken. If Russia didn't have nukes, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd have been driven out of Ukraine by now through direct Western military intervention. They're the only reason they can throw any weight around in the way they have.
And realistically, they're probably going to end their adventure with a big chunk of conquered Ukrainian territory permanently in their hands.
I totally agree with this. I just think this is a very weak result. You have the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and all it does for you is limit (not even prevent!) the intervention of foreign powers so that you can engage in a slow, grinding war of conquest that might end up giving you a small bit of additional territory after years of bloodshed. That’s certainly something, but hardly seems worthy of being considered the second strongest military power. M
> That’s certainly something, but hardly seems worthy of being considered the second strongest military power.
It's that conclusion I disagree with. Their relative ranking has nothing to do with their absolute capability. Russia being able to do what they've already done in the face of the opponents they have probably makes them 2nd or 3rd strongest military power in the world. I think few other countries could manage to do even that.
Sure, maybe in an alternate universe a totally politically unrestrained US military could conquer a Ukraine (receiving a similar level of foreign material assistance) from halfway around the world, but that just means the gap between 1st and 2nd/3rd is large.
You must be thinking of the Iraq War (2003), which Putin tried to imitate but failed. The Gulf War (1991) was a slow invasion that started with several weeks of aerial bombardment. A similar operation would have given foreign aid more time to arrive in Ukraine. By the time the coalition started the ground invasion in the Gulf War, Ukraine had already received substantial military aid and won the Battle of Kyiv.
Battle of Kyiv lasted about as long, and Ukraine definitely received enough aid to make a difference. On April 7, 2022 (43 days into the invasion), it was reported that Ukraine had received 25k anti-aircraft weapons systems and 60k anti-tank systems.
The hard part of counterfactuals is that the result of a counterfactual is often an entity that shares only a name in common with the real historical entity. Could the Soviet Union have survived? Sure, maybe, if it didn't look anything like the Soviet Union that actually existed. Could the Chernobyl accident have been avoided? Sure, if the reactor hadn't been designed for better weapons production, if the crew hadn't been pushed to perform an unusually risky procedure, or if the crew had the initiative to avoid the problems they encountered. But the Soviet Union that actually existed was overly militarized and had a culture where obedience was more important than safety, and if it didn't have those traits then it wouldn't have been the Soviet Union that actually existed
There are a lot of ways to break crowds up into 2 groups. One of them is the people who believe reality is more important vs. people who are convinced that The Narrative is more important. Really interesting debate - the narrative people are usually right and they certainly have the numbers but when the reality people have a point it is rather overwhelming. Narratives cannot overcome economics.
This article seems to be a narrative person's perspective. Once the Communists gave up control of the media, blam. Game over. The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water. People do make reference to their actual real-world experiences when pushing for change in government.
> In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I just struggle to accept that Gorbachev was being intellectually honest with this one. Is that really where he assigned the blame? The USSR had real economic and legal problems. The US had spent decades showing up just how bad Soviet policies were.
The USSR had real problems but something like Chernobyl exposed the out in the open. Had it been a chemical event, the Soviets might have still gotten away with it. But a nuclear event with thousands of eye witnesses and even more people responsible for clean-up? And fallout that spread across the entirety of Europe?
We kind of saw a similar process in the beginning of COVID, when China was actively suppressing information internally. But it may not have had the same results because of deeper state centralization and information control, as well as other countries having to bother with the same issue. Yet it still sparked a number of protests across China, due to directly or indirectly being affected by COVID-19.
Narrative people vs reality people maps quite well to the left/right split.
Gorbachev probably did assign blame to Chernobyl. The USSR collapsed not due to internal revolution but because the people at the very top of the system became so demoralized they basically gave up on it. Key people just stopped fighting to defend the system, and the event that demoralized them was a bit different for each.
If you look at the career trajectory of Yeltsin, who never gets enough credit for the ending of the USSR, then it's a very clear case of someone at the top levels of the Soviet system suddenly realizing just how far ahead the US was in its provision of consumer surplus. The USSR was very effective at censoring information, including from people very high up the ladder. He visited a Randalls supermarket as part of a diplomatic mission to NASA and after realizing it wasn't staged or fake, it changed him forever. He became an outspoken critic of the system from the inside, which destabilized the regime. He was exiled from power and the pressure nearly killed him as part of this, but the other Soviets never did put a bullet in his head in the way they might have done in an earlier era.
Why not? Well, perhaps because the experience of dealing with Chernobyl had sapped their confidence so much. It's easy to overlook what an absolutely massive drain on the USSR's resources and time of senior party officials it was. And because everyone knew, and everyone knew everyone knew, it dealt a huge blow to their own ability to shape the view of the Soviet system. They suddenly had to divert vast resources and years of time to cleaning up a huge disaster of their own making. Undoubtably this demoralized Gorbachev significantly, and many others.
> The realist argument would probably be that reforming to a justice system with some integrity and adopting some policies to score consecutive years of 10% growth was all they needed to keep treading water.
"all they needed" - as if that's easy to achieve consistently for decades.
In the end what killed it was the combination of stagnation and the ability to freely talk about it.
When Lenin stepped off the train in his return to Russia in April 1917, he was probably the only person in Russia who thought Russia would be run by socialists within a year - the other Bolsheviks certainly didn't. They were working to support Kerensky.
Russia's economy was about the size of Brazil's at the time, and he said socialists would go into a holding action in Russia while the real socialist revolution happened to the west.
From the perspective of its inception, there was no failure in the Soviet Union, the failure was in the revolution in Germany.
The Soviet Union was first headless in 1975. After Brezhnev's stroke, he was no longer fit to govern. The people in the back room — mostly Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB — ran the country by favor-trading and bumbled their way into Afghanistan.
But the mistakes started earlier. The arrest of Khrushchev in 1964 may already have been the point of no return. When you are faking the procedure, at least you retain some possibility of belief in democratic — or at least bureaucratic — principles. But when you just arrest the leader one day, the illusion is broken. Nobody can really believe you anymore.
The Five-Year Plan of 1965-70 — the Kosygin reform — was a success by almost all conventional economic measures [1]. Growth improved, innovation occurred, wages went up. But it was reversed. Some people in the party didn't believe that it was Marxist enough. Brezhnev, having come into office how he did, could never have had the courage to demand some kind of pragmatism that could have led the Soviet Union to the transformation that China underwent just a few years later. A nation can't be run like a mob, with everyone looking over their shoulder to see if they're going to be taken outside next. It paralyzes decision-making.
So when Brezhnev had a stroke and could barely even perform the superficial functions of leadership, nobody even wanted the job. Surely, if Khrushchev could be ousted from his position for his drunkenness, Brezhnev's incapacity should have been more than sufficient. Andropov, the leader of the KGB, was effectively calling the shots at that point, and when Leonid finally kicked the bucket in 1982, it was indeed Andropov who took over. But isn't it telling that for seven years, Andropov could have easily become the leader of the world's second-largest economy and simply didn't want to? What does that say about his confidence in the system he was running?
By the time Gorbachev was in the chair there just wasn't anything left to save. You can't have a vanguard-party government without a functioning vanguard party. The multi-party systems have all proven more resilient because when one of the parties starts to malfunction, it is removed from power and has the opportunity to reinvent itself or be replaced. No single-party state has lasted longer than China's current run, which is also starting to show a few cracks.
So far the two-party system in the United States has avoided the notionally unlikely situation that both parties become highly dysfunctional at the same time. But I don't like the news these days.
From any realistic humanitarian perspective, the fall of the Soviet Union was a horrific crisis that resulted in untold amounts of human suffering and poverty. Russia spiraled into a terrible mess, celebrated by the West.
Perhaps worth noting, shortly after the fall around 1991, Yeltsin hijacked the Russian government and prevented Communists from retaking power. The pattern of events immediately after the fall (and their strong support from the West) raises an eyebrow about how exactly the "collapse" was precipitated.
Yeltsin used self-anointed emergency powers to abolish the Constitutional Court and dissolve parliament. When the people protested, he ordered a military attack on parliament, killing hundreds and jailing hundreds of protesters.
Yeltsin seized control of all broadcast media, banned opposition publications, and permanently outlawed 15 political parties. He ordered assassinations of his political opponents, parliamentary deputies, and journalists.
Yeltsin illegally dissolved the Russian constitution and replaced it with one that gave himself nearly absolute power over policy.
By 1996, he was losing badly in his bid for re-election. A communist candidate was far in the lead.
During re-election, his administration was bankrolled to the tune of $10B by the IMF and World Bank. Even so, he was still trailing the communist candidate by a long shot. So, he threatened civil war, making it clear he would not relinquish power. About half of the country thought there would be a civil war if the communists won. Ultimately, he rigged the vote count, as reported by ABC news in the US.
When he won re-election, Bill Clinton famously lauded the event, saying Russia has "turned its back on tyranny".
Don't conflate economic mismanagement with the collapse of an evil empire. For me and my entire family the collapse was a gift that allowed us to finally leave. Staying in character even at the border by stealing what little we had in cash to punish us for leaving. The Soviet Union stole my grandparents and great grandparent's entire life's potential. Forcing them into a life time of servitude to barely scrape by for a shitty Soviet apartment and a shitty car that you needed to wait 10 years to get. It is bafflingly amusing that one would point at any illegality of anything a successor of a Soviet premier does when the reality was that they had absolute power to do whatever they want as is Russian tradition.
The fall of the USSR was hugely beneficial to the occupied states in Eastern Europe, as well as several of the member republics. It does not seem to have gone well for Russia, though.
That’s probably how it goes when an oppressive empire falls. The core will suffer while the oppressed periphery gets a chance to flourish.
Yugoslavia was not one of the occupied states. Tito famously liberated the country before the Red Army and told Stalin to go fuck himself.
I have no idea what you’re talking about with bombing or sanctions. What formerly occupied Eastern European country suffered this? For that matter, what formerly occupied Eastern European country isn’t wildly better off today than they were in 1989?
You try to cherry-pick facts to prove that somehow, someway that communism is superior to capitalism. This ignores a century of evidence showing communism has only lead to mass death, mass misery, and poverty in the form of systematic theft and wealth transfer to an elite that the system is somehow meant to prevent. It ignores human nature and the reality that this system enforces economic slavery with little to show for it. The people of that generation were failed by economic mismanagement, both before, and after the fall of the USSR. Instead of the China model of allowing capitalism a slow ramp up while keeping certain things nationalized they instead decided to simply destroy their existing institutions. That is not a failure of capitalism. That is a failure of Russia and of the Russian people and their communist system which instilled a national tradition of corruption the likes of which no western nation has ever seen. No poll is going to change the economic success of China and of Eastern Europe in the wake of the fall of the Iron Curtain. A downvote with a textual rebuke is the most polite we can be on this topic. Your entire career path as it stands now is a product of western capitalist nations working together for common purpose and for the betterment of mankind.
If you had any sense you would be on your hands and knees thanking providence for the luck you had being born in a time and place where you are able to pick and choose your own destiny instead of being shoehorned into a blue collar 8 to 6 factory job refining crude oil for the soviet state or being sent to a front line like those poor North Korean soldiers.
I think China is proof that it could have survived if it had followed similar policies and allowed private enterprise to run in parallel to the communist system.
No centrally planned economy can survive in the long term. Resource allocation is so skewed that it kills such systems. No free market pricing means that economic decisions aren't taking into account the costs. Even in USSR with the vast mineral wealth this couldn't save them.
Milton Friedman has a good summary on why this happened:
Wal-Mart is a big org in a relatively free competitive market . This is the big difference between countries and big organizations.
USSR didn't compete with other countries outside of the oil and some other resource markets. They imported food (wheat) and now are one of the largest exporters (or they were before the full-scale war).
It's a tough question. After the fall of the Soviet Union, living conditions in Russia became much worse. The brief period of liberal democracy didn't work out. (Very like the Kerensky period in 1917). Trying to transition to postmodern capitalism did not work out well at all. Then Russia got oligarchs and the Russian mafia, which was basically the old national security state privatized. More recently, Putin crushed the oligarchs and started a war.
Arguably. Russia's most successful period since the mid 19th century was under Communism.
> The brief period of liberal democracy didn't work out. (Very like the Kerensky period in 1917). Trying to transition to postmodern capitalism did not work out well at all.
Note that this happened to most post-communist countries. 90s were uniformly bad, in the 00s things started to get better. The troubles likely don't have much to do with the liberal democracy as such, but with the transition of the economic system.
> Arguably. Russia's most successful period since the mid 19th century was under Communism.
The early decades were indeed quite impressive (transformed an agrarian country into an industrial powerhouse), but they did not manage to keep up the momentum, and it's questionable whether it was even possible with the planned economy.
It's interesting to consider what might have happened if GOSPLAN had enough compute power. GOSPLAN used to have an annual planning cycle and a monthly info update cycle. Walmart has a weekly planning cycle and a daily info update cycle. Amazon probably runs faster than that.
It's sort of an article of faith in economics that a centrally planned economy can't work, but there are some rather large centrally planned systems now. Walmart and Amazon are each probably bigger than the USSR's entire consumer economy.
On an annual cycle, GOSPLAN could only provide general guidance - add up everybody's steel needs and tell the steel plants. That sort of worked for big stuff, but not for small parts.
Factories tended to make too many of their own small parts. (Some US companies used to do that - IBM, Remington Rand, and Teletype all made their own screws.)
GOSPLAN never made it to bar codes, either. Today, everything in business is tracked as it moves. GOSPLAN never had that kind of info.
Amazon isn't a centrally planned economy. It's a market free-for-all. That's why you can so easily find stuff on it like AI generated books that claim cows have no legs and can see in 360 degrees:
No central planner is going to sign off on selling that. More importantly, Amazon doesn't try to set all prices. On its market, sellers are allowed to set their own prices and frequently use complex strategies to do so. The heart of central planning is an attempt to have one institution set all prices.
> It's sort of an article of faith in economics that a centrally planned economy can't work
It is now, sure, because of all the attempts to make it work that failed. Back when the USSR was new it was the other way around, the intellectual class were convinced that the Soviet system was better and the future. That included some economists!
The problem with centrally planned economics wasn't a lack of compute power, it was that the information needed to select the correct prices isn't something you can gather in one place. A lot of it exists only in people's minds and isn't even written down anywhere.
I'm inclined to think with modern statistical and computational methods one could get close to a working planned economy. However, taking into account corruption and politics, this model would break within a decade and lead to inefficiencies and shortages.
I think there might be a similarity in our market economy models and their blind spots related to limited resources and environmental considerations.
The Soviet Union could have survived if a central political power had survived, but by the late 1970s this was becoming impossible. The collapse of the USSR resembles the collapse of many states that are overtaken by oligarchs, and the oligarchs were gaining power long before the USSR collapsed, though they were called Apparatchiks and had somewhat different roles, and less freedom-of-maneuver than the true oligarchs that emerged in the 1990s. But by the late 1970s the largest industrial powers were consolidating into a single bloc that would be able to defy the Politburo, and so Gorbachev had to worry about a coup the entire time he was in charge, and he was never able to push through the reforms that he knew were needed.
I'll post here a long excerpt from the best book on the topic.
The only force that proved strong enough to break the military-industry-agriculture coalition that dominated Soviet politics was the collapse of the Communist Party - which in turn caused the dissolution of the Soviet state. Until mid-1991, the three economic lobbies were bound together by interest, ideology, and inertia. Had Gorbachev been able to divide the coalition partners, playing one interest group against the others, he might have had more success in asserting control over the Communist Party and the Soviet state. But a strategy of divide and rule proved impossible. So long as they dominated the Communist Party, and as long as the party controlled the state, these groups’ shared interests overwhelmed any tactical alliance Gorachev could have conceivably offered. In the years after the collapse of 1991, with the military divided and discredited by the failed coup, and with industry and agriculture writhing under the pain of inflation and depression, Russian president Boris Yeltsin finally managed to split the groups, co-opting much industrial support while slashing farm subsidies and cutting military funding. Even though the Soviet Union by then no longer existed, however, Yeltsin still faced several years of resistance in his attempt to break the lobbies’ stranglehold on the federal budget and on the central bank. Only after Yeltsin shelled parliament in 1993, pushing the country to the brink of civil war, was the military-industry-agriculture coalition finally destroyed.
Was the Soviet Union simply unreformable? China’s experience proved that there is nothing inherent in Marxism-Leninism, in autocratic political systems, or in centrally planned economies, that makes a transition to a market economy impossible. In the USSR, to be sure, decades of wasteful investment left the country a burdensome economic inheritance. Yet the most damaging legacy of the command economy was not economic inefficiency, but political sclerosis. The Soviet system proved unreformable not because its economic problems were insurmountable, but because it entrusted vast political power to groups that had every reason to sabotage efforts to resolve the country’s economic dilemmas. In part, this situation was the result of the USSR’s relative wealth. When Deng took power in China, for example, the country’s farmers were on the brink of starvation. No matter what Deng did, the state of China’s countryside could hardly get worse, so China faced no built-in lobby that opposed change. By contrast, the USSR was stuck in a politically induced middle-income trap: many Soviet citizens, especially among the elite, lived decent lives that were threatened by change. Whereas Chinese farmers embraced decollectivization, Soviet farmers - who had benefited from several decades’ worth of farm subsidies - found that Gorbachev’s agriculture policies offered risks as well as rewards. A similar mechanism obstructed change in Soviet manufacturing and service enterprises.
Economic efficiency was also restrained by the relative leniency of the Communist Party during the postwar period. Under Stalin, the party had few interest groups because the Soviet dictator enforced his writ through purges and mass killings. Enterprise managers dared not miss production targets, on pain of death. The rapid rotation of cadres, facilitated by Stalin’s purges, reduced the influence of patronage networks. Brezhnev’s policy of “stability of the cadres” ended the use of the firing squad to encourage effective management. That made the Soviet system more humane, but it degraded incentives to work efficiently. Bureaucrats and managers now faced few reasons to act effectively: their firms could not go bankrupt, their salaries did not depend on performance, and they received promotions based on political connections. In China, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s had shaken up the party and the bureaucracy, cutting back the strength of interest groups and paving the way for Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the 1960s and 1970s saw patronage network and interest groups solidify. Gorbachev inherited a system in which economic lobby groups played a larger role than ever before. Yet his powers as head of the Communist Party were weaker than any Soviet leader since the Bolsheviks took power in 1917.
The Soviet Union collapsed less than 5 years after Deng retired in 1989 and his economic model had only begun to bear fruit in the mid 80s. “For decades” is a wildly ignorant thing to say.
Chernobyl hastened the end. Not only was it an enormous ecological and economic disaster, that caused, as the article says, a loss of confidence in the central government, but it was a boost for the Ukrainian independence movement. And without Ukraine, there really is no Soviet Union, no empire. Just Russia and few satellite states.
What I’m saying is that Chernobyl was evidence of rot at the core. Really powerful evidence, but the rot was a fact, not a perception. If not Chernobyl, and I really wish it had been anything else, something else would have gone spectacularly off the rails because while you can hide many truths, incompetence and apathy both tend to reveal the truth of themselves. Corruption can conceal itself because it serves its own purposes. Concealing apathy is a fight against its own motives.
That would make the answer "no". Putin's Russia will end with Putin because it has the same problem that all autocratic regimes have: succession.
After Putin, the oligarchs will scrabble about trying to get the most of what's left. If it gets really bad Russia will descend into civil war. Russia just recently had a mini-civil war with Prigozhin's rebellion.
If Russia ends up in civil war then China will invade Siberia under the guise of peace keeping to secure the resources it currently depends on from Russia.
China will cut deals with whichever oligarchs win out and part of the deal will be that China takes territory that they see as historically Chinese (such as Outer Manchuria).
China is unlikely to invade a failing state simply because it already has enough on its plate without trying to build some other nation too. We know this because to a large extent this is already what’s happening with Myanmar where rebels have seized control of border towns with China without so much as a peep.
Precisely this situation is unfolding in Myanmar right now. The junta is so weakened that they have no choice but to turn to China. Chinese troops will be in Myanmar soon to protect Chinese infrastructure investment:
There might be a power struggle, but a civil war? Nope. For that, you'd need (at least two) roughly equally matched adversaries controlling the armed forces. You don't see anything like that and such division doesn't spring up out of nothing.
China will also not invade Siberia, it's much easier to control it economically than turning your quasi-ally into a mortal enemy. (besides, nukes)
I think subsequent events have proven that Soviet Russia had the capacity to retain at least some of its empire by force, especially if they coupled that with a de facto return to a market economy, the course that worked so well in China. But to his credit Gorbachev decided not to send in troops, and the coup that resulted was too ineptly planned to stick. Gorbachev was a complicated man, certainly no saint, but the decision to let the Soviet empire go merits him a statue or two.
[1] The Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981 was suppressed by the Polish army without foreign involvement, but the military junta all but said that the alternative was a Soviet invasion. Whether or not this is true is actively debated in Polish historiography, but was universally believed at the time.