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.

  • HarryLime [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Vncredleader
      ·
      2 years ago

      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

      • baguettePants [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yep, debt has always been a political issue rather than an economic one

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          2 years ago

          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

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • HarryLime [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.