Thoughts on the Cold War and the Soviet Union

(note: don't even think about putting your trust in the below text. The research in it comes from Wikipedia, hardly the most in-depth study of the Soviet Union. and it's all my opinion.)


Many conservatives believe that Reagan defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly: without Reagan, we'd still be 15 minutes from Mad Max. Other conservatives, and most liberals, believe that communism destroyed itself. Both of these views have some grounding in fact: communism, as practiced by the Soviet Union, was an inefficient and corrupt economic system. The only way the Soviet Union was able to compete with the US was putting proportionally much more of its economy into the military. And Reagan's arms buildup forced the poorer Soviet Union to try and match the United States, probably slightly accerating its fall(and nearly throwing the United States into a depression, but that's for another time).

I have some thoughts on the subject, and how the Soviet Union could have survived to the present day. Collectivized farming, as a system, was useless... up to 40% of the wheat crop rotted before distribution, forcing the USSR to import grain from the Midwest. If they'd successfully reformed the system, like China after Mao, the Soviet Union would have been a net exporter of grain.

Another thing: Soviet science was extremely goal-oriented. That gave them a huge boost in the space race(just look now... Soyuz capsules are still going up while the Shuttle fleet is grounded, and this is from a bankrupt authoritarian ruin of country), when they could assign scientists to discover how to send a shuttle into space. But most of the scientists didn't have a chance to direct their own research, no "blue sky" research if you like, as in the free world. If the Soviets could liberalize their research system, they might have gained an edge on the Yankees.

The last thing: Soviet citizens ("proleteriat") weren't proud to be Soviet citizens, like Americans... or Nazis. Most were deeply cynical about the whole thing... the stereotype of the dour Russian. What if a charismatic yet intelligent leader had been able to rise to power after Stalin? Someone who could make the Soviets proud to be part of the USSR, not cynical and pessimisstic.

TV should have been more than, as the old Soviet joke goes three channels with the same speech by a grey-haired Politburo member and a fourth with a man telling them to switch back to the othrer channel. They should take a leaf out of FOX's books... a 24-hr news channel showing how good the Soviet Union is. Better TV: "Cosma Trek: Captain Kirov and the crew of the Collective travel and bring the revolution in the name of the Socialist Union of Planets!" Make a Soviet James Bond! A "cool Russia" phenomenon, like the "cool Japan" phenomenon in our world, could have made Communism a lot more attractive to the free world's youth.

And one more thing... if the Soviets could have exploited the racial tensions in America, and the Americans hadn't defused them, the US could have had a pretty terrible time during the Cold War.

None of these changes would have made the Soviet Union any less totalarian or communist. But I believe that they would have made the Soviet Union more able to survive.