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.
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.
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.