The Soviet leadership at the time you go back to will absolutely follow through on your advice.
For me, I'd go back to say the early 60s and tell them to invest absolutely everything they can into computers, cybernetics, linear programming, etc; and using those tools for optimal central planning of the economy. Optimal both in the sense of economic efficiency and for greater democracy in the planning decisions. Get people to feel like they have a say in the economic plans and I think you short-circuit a lot of the consumerist drives. But ultimately, you just need that computing power to run a modern centrally planned economy.
I thought about telling them to make a Xi-like anti-corruption push in the 70s or so (and Andropov was working on that before he died). But I think if you get them to focus on the stuff I mentioned above a lot of the corruption might ultimately sort itself out.
I also thought about telling Stalin that he really needs to think about maybe approaching collectivization of the farms a bit differently. But I don't know what I'd tell him to do differently though. It was a mess at first but eventually the collective farms helped get Soviet agriculture where it needed to be, I think.
Yeah I agree that this answer is probably along the right lines. Everything in Russia always hinged on proletarian revolution in Western Europe. Lenin gets shit sometimes for gambling everything on that but there was no choice- Russia was a backwater that couldn't possibly carry the world on its own. Once revolution was crushed by reactionaries, particularly in Germany, there was no real hope anymore in the USSR for anything other than Stalin/Khrushchev's approach of just trying to hold out as long as possible. If you want real victory and lasting stability, you've got to help Rosa or Liebknecht.
I wonder if there is anything one could do that would actually change the outcome in germany. It'd be nice if Rosa Luxemburg was warned and had time to gtfo or whatever but would that have changed the overall outcome in germany? I guess you could draw a parallel and say that the spartacist uprising was sort of like the July days, but a lot of the bolshevik leadership like Lenin escaped the July days unlike spartacus. And then you could say october 1917 was similar to the subsequent revolts that happened throughout germany in various cities. Reality is more complicated than a comparison though, no idea if it was really within grasp at all.
Yeah, this is the big critique of my suggestion. I don't know enough to actually state what I would tell the Spartacist to try to change history (or if it even is plausible that it could have been changed).
Okay China is NOT GOING TO LIKE post-stalin revisionism and you're gonna need strong allies in the fight against global capitalism. DO NOT PISS OFF MAO.
My single action is i shoot krushchev in the side of the head after lining him up with the other guys :jadue-heh:
Invent pizza hut in Russia before it exists in the US.
Invest hard in the generation that fought in WWII, both materially and in teaching high-quality theory and critical analysis, so that the CPSU is lively and powerful enough to oppose/remove the shitty leadership it ended up with and to be flexible in the right ways, including economically and in not fucking over China.
The ability of the USSR to fail due to the decisions of a few leaders comes from systemic instabilities: they shouldn't have been leadership in the first place and should've been removed when they fucked up.
You can solve both problems by telling Stalin to sober Zhdanov the fuck up.
Yeah, look, he's not gonna go all Ultravisionary and he's basically the Soviet version of Scotty from Marketing, but he'd be able to stop Beria and Kruschev and control Molotov and Zhukov.
Unfortunately Zhdanov is one of the possible leaders for a revived Soviet Union in the HOI4 mod TNO. He tries to techbro cosmist his way into reviving the Soviet Economy, with mixed results.
So he's now an annoying meme.
Then you get Beria and the USSR becomes a US puppet.
:jesse-wtf:
:corn-man-khrush: :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
Also have to ask: I’m not a trot but it seems like trotsky was actually right about the USSR—but only after :corn-man-khrush: took over. Discuss.
i'd bring a giant bag of literature on media control in the west and tell them how they can let artists & political speech go buck wild if they properly account for it & do secret enough repression.
i'll teach stalin to manufacture consent :stalin-feels-good:
i'd definitely do what you did and maybe expand it a bit into the geopolitical realm. i like that you want to fix the material conditions instead of try to target specific leadership hoping that changes the timeline enough which seems too great man theory for my liking. going for a systemic change, like get the soviets to do their own cybersyn in the 70s and push for strong economic democracy then it might not matter who's in charge. once the soviet union becomes an unstoppable economic engine right as the U.S. is faltering and preparing for it's neoliberal transition it's basically game over for capitalism.
also i'd add that the U.S. is destined for collapse and not to try a 1 to 1 attempt at matching theirs and NATOs military capability. instead just strengthen defensive capabilities and intelligence agencies. maybe even do a fake-out to get the U.S. and NATO to go insane on military spending right while the western economy is at it's weakest. and absolutely tell the USSR about how the oil crisis is going to go down and how to take advantage of it to cripple the west.
if possible and it's not too late also tell them to push to mend Soviet-Chinese relations as priority #1. using the new technological-industrial revolution to create an economic union that can effectively do what modern china does now.: become the world's #1 commodity production juggernaut and essentially make it irresistible for the capitalists to not want to do business (and sell them the rope to hang themselveds with)post-oil crisis the unified powers can hijack the nascent neoliberal order before the 80s kicks off, making the west utterly dependent on Soviet-Sino production and resources and use that to gain dominance.
