I've seen many people on this site talk about how if Andropov lived longer he could have prevented the collapse of the USSR or at least increased its odds of survival. I'm curious as to what his reforms were that people here mention.
It's not so much specific reform plans he had, but more the fact that he was a much more serious, competent, and level-headed politician than Gorbachev was. He had a good grasp of the problems that the USSR faced. The indications are that he wanted to do something similar to Perestroika, but there are reasons to believe that he would have gone about it in a much more intelligent way, like Deng Xiaoping did. We know Andropov was very interested in trying out things that had been done in Hungary and Yugoslavia.
When Andropov began exploring reforms, it was partially in response to new, not quite sanctions, but financial obstacles the US was trying to put in place to cut off the USSR's access to credit from European banks. This was happening in conjunction with lower government revenues due to low oil prices. Andropov specifically referenced the financial situation in his exploration of reforms. By contrast, Gorbachev never referenced improving government finances when he launched his own reforms, and Perestroika wound up wrecking the USSR's finances due to his mismanagement of monetary policy. It's hard to imagine Andropov making the same mistake there.
Andropov was also very worried about nationalist undercurrents as a threat to the political system. After the fall of the USSR, one of his colleagues claimed that Andropov floated a plan to him to redraw the borders of the SSRs and split up the RSFSR to dilute the influence of national minorities and ethnic groups in order to curb any potential nationalist uprisings. Who knows if he could have accomplished this, but the story shows how worried he was about the issue. Gorbachev completely bungled national policy, and rising nationalism became the vehicle for self-interested politicians to break up the USSR and maximize their own power.
The only misgiving I have in any of that is the idea of trying out what was done in Yugoslavia given how internally tumultuous that economy was, being held up by debts for decades
Yugoslavia’s debt is an overblown issue. Most of the individual republics are now several times more indebted, then all of them together were, in Yugoslavia, but suddenly it doesn’t matter because they did the neoliberalism.
Yep, debt has always been a political issue rather than an economic one
Being more indebted now doesn't really change the fact that the Yugoslav system was flawed . And with that last point, yeah that's why you are never gonna win taking out loans unless you are a neoliberal country. A leftist project will only get screwed over by that shit
I'm not sure if they couldve pulled off dengism, gorby insisted on glasnost and political reform because of the nomenklatura - they probably wouldn't have implemented dengism without some change up. They really should've been training up lower cadres way more and, honestly, China was probably only able to do dengism because the cultural revolution eliminated or at least side lined their version of the nomenklatura in addition to later seeing how those reforms turned out in the USSR.
Here's a quote from Vladislav Zubok's collapse that shows what Andropov thought about this:
From the early 1960s, when he worked in the Party apparatus in Moscow, Andropov surrounded himself with scholars and intellectuals. He wanted to know what the intelligentsia thought; he was also interested in the problem of modernization and renovation of Soviet economy. Andropov’s intellectuals were people of the war generation, who believed in Marxist-Leninist socialism, were shocked by revelations of Stalin’s crimes, and dreamed of reforms from above. 7 One of them, Georgy Shakhnazarov, a philosopher and sociologist, recalled a discussion between them: what could be a viable communist model that might replace the Stalinist model? Andropov invited his intellectual “consultants” to speak with absolute candor.
Andropov posed Lenin’s famous question: What is to be done? How to make the Soviet state function well as an instrument of socialism? Shakhnazarov responded: the problem was the stifling Party diktat. Without “socialist democracy” and genuine elections, the consultant argued, the Party bureaucracy would always act as a class with vested interests, and would not care about people’s well-being. Andropov’s face darkened. He cut Shakhnazarov off. In the past, he said, the Soviet system had accomplished fantastic, nearly impossible things. The Party bureaucracy, he acknowledged, had got “rusty,” but its leadership was ready “to shake up” the economy. It would be a folly to dismantle the Party-State prematurely. “Only when people begin to feel that their life improves, then one can slowly loosen the yoke on them, give them more air . . . You, the intelligentsia folks, like to cry out: give us democracy, freedom! You ignore many realities.” 9 “In some unfathomable way,” Shakhnazarov recalled, “two different men co-existed in Andropov—a man of the Russian intelligentsia, in the common sense of this word, and a bureaucrat who saw his vocation as a service to the Party.” 10
You may be right that he would have been pressured into doing some kind of Glasnost-like political reform at some point, but the question is if it would have happened in an improving or deteriorating economic and social situation. Gorbachev rammed through Glasnost because he blamed the Party for the failures of Perestroika and was looking to create a political force to counter it. Several of the AES countries that still exist, specifically China, Vietnam, and Cuba, have implemented political reforms that are aimed at making Socialist institutions more responsive and accountable to the public, and the intelligentsia of those countries seems to be happier with their system than the Soviet intelligentsia were.
If the entire system collapsing depended on whether one dude kicked the bucket... then the system didn't collapse just because one dude kicked the bucket. Being in a position where that could happen is what did it.
Yeah its true it wasn't just one guy, a lot had to go wrong. I don't think Gorby helped though, I do think it's possible in some alt history to preserve the USSR but it'd have to change significantly, and would probably lose the Baltics (but the rest obviously stays). I dunno if they could do dengism without glasnost and the political part of perestroika like some people say, the PRC was able to continue with their reforms because they saw how the USSR cracked open because of both.
I think there's a view of these leaders that makes sense: they are the leaders of factions, and act as placeholders for them. Gorbachev having power takes the party leadership's consent. The party itself establishes who is leadership. Gorbachev is both a symptom and cause of decay in the party apparatus.
The USSR could have been saved in some form as late as 1991. It was a near-run thing and a few months of perseverance might have kept it together, or at least kept the RSFSR Socialist. However, in terms of saving it as a Socialist world power the Soviets had two options, Cybernetisation or NEP/Dengism.
Cybernetics was killed by the early 70s, Both Gorby and Andropov wanted to do Dengism of differing levels, but Groby was infected with liberal doctrine and USA worship (a problem that was rife in the USSR and even China, where the worst missteps of the Dengist reforms were due to Chicago School economists being worshipped.) and opened up his political system right up to every CIA op the USA could conceive of for the last 50 years.
Building off what you said, I think cybernetics could have made the all the difference for the sustainability of socialism in the USSR. I can't be too harsh on Soviet leadership, since we have the benefit of hindsight. But still, my interpretation of the situation follows: by the 1960s, the Soviet economy really did need significant reform. Khrushchev's answer was a form of market socialism to get more consumer goods to the people - which if I'm feeling generous, I suppose could have been an acceptable solution had the implementation been (a lot) better. But the cybernetic solution was on the table. The Soviet leadership was told cybernetic investment would eventually be hugely beneficial BUT it would be similar to the investment in the space program, which was a lot. Leadership balked at the cost and went with Corn Man's discount market socialism. More about all that here
when we say cybernetics, are we just talking investing in computers?
my exact question, thank you.
like what are talking about here, what do we mean by cybernetics?
I'm imagining that it involves maintaining much more of the central planning that USSR had before the market reforms, but using computers to do the calculations. Soviets had been determining production quotas, prices, wages etc with a bunch of smart people, pencils and paper.
Kind of, but it's more about management. Cybernetics is about autonomy and reacting to things on the fly. It's about the constant flow of information and feedback. Like you set some goals to the factories you manage, they manage their thing autonomously and just send daily or weekly key numbers so that central command can see if there's a problem and help adjust goals or involve additional resources quickly.
Computers are important but for example in Chile they used cybernetic principles to manage the economy successfully and at most they had something like fax machines.
I’ve seen many people on this site talk about how if Andropov lived longer he could have prevented the collapse of the USSR
You can't even blame this on gerontocracy, since he was only 68 when he took office. I mean... strictly speaking, no government fairs well when its leadership suddenly drops dead. But you could say the same thing about Andrei Gromyko, who only lasted three years as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Or Vasili Kuznetsov who kicked it in 1990. Or Konstantin Chernenko who kicked it in 1985.
This wasn't a one-man thing. It was an entire generation of Soviet Leaders who were dying out in the mid-80s with nobody comparably zealous to replace them. The detente of the 60s and 70s had worn away the revolutionary fervor of the prior generation and created a new generation of Soviet Citizens more fixated on domestic quality of life than Internationalism. Prior to Reagan (and even during Reagan) there was a significant deescalation of tension and an increase in interstate commerce between Soviet Bloc and Western states.
Americans achieved a kind-of cultural propaganda victory over the Eastern Bloc that no single leader could have forestalled. The Soviets lost pride in their domestic economic system while Western hubris was overflowing.
Had Russians seen the state of the American social order in 2020, I suspect liberalization would have been a far harder sell. American domestic collapse is doing wonders for modern day Russian nationalism as well as Chinese pride-of-place, by comparison.
