This is a background detail for a sci-fi novel and is not really important to the main plot or any specific ideological tenet. I have a tenuous grasp of non-RA2 history, so here's a summary of what I've been shower-thoughting:
- Sino Soviet Split happens in the 60s, maybe like normal.
- Deng Xiaoping is assassinated or couped in the 70s, resulting in roading to capitalism
- USSR reacts with re-stalinization or w/e
- By 2010, China is fascist, USSR is principled AF, the US has a weird divide where some states turned to light socialism and some turned hard fascist, weakening the federal government for being effective at anything outside of imperialism.
I know in novel writing you can just hand-wave anything, but any advice for "making it work" or replacement ideas would be appreciated. The whole purpose of this is for me to rule-of-cool the USSR still being around.
Once you know all the details it feel like any of a hundred different dominos could have fallen a different way to keep the USSR around. Here's two:
The anti-Gorbachev coup never happens, the USSR's constitution gets rewritten as planned and it becomes a commonwealth of socialist and social-democratic nations. If this happens there is some liberalization, some of the USSR's states break away (these almost certainly get the Yugoslavia treatment by the west), but most of Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain united in an EU-like bloc. The 90s would probably still suck, but far less than they did in our timeline, and having a strong opponent to the US on the world stage might prevent for example both invasions of Iraq.
The anti-Gorbachev coup is successful, Yeltsin and the right wing are crushed, the new leadership institutes re-Stalinization and nationalizes everything that Gorby privatized. This probably results in a difficult transition in the 90s, and open warfare in the USSRs border states that really wanted to break off, but it's possible for everything to stabilize before the end of the decade, with the USSR holding all of its territory at the cost of being ostracized for its actions internationally (think 1956 Hungarian uprising but three times as bad).
Maybe just have someone other than Gorbachev take over the USSR and it lasts until today? The Sino-Soviet split was starting to thaw out by the late 80s, and a diplomatic rapprochement was happening. You could look at the way Russia and China have built an alliance recently based on shared interests and grievances, and have that happen in the 90s-00s.
I don't know the nitty gritty enough to say anything specific but the conditions outside of the USSR/China changing could also impact it. Maybe something happens to disrupt US / Europe relations or the post-war restructuring of the global economy, or a disaster hits the US making them less of a threat.
