Making the USSR Great Again!

[Minuteman37]

Pitch me ideas for how the USSR could of avoided it's collapse and continued to exist in the present.

Rules
1.) They must ostensibly be the _BAD GUYS_, no benevolent Dictator who didn't starve ethnic groups he didn't like.
2.) Superscience! and Magical solutions are valid, but should be kept to a One Big Lie, or a couple of closely related applied phenomenon. A crystal ball that reveals the future on one end, to the contents of a single crashed
UFO on the other.
3.) Bonus points will be given to any solution that's firmly grounded in the fictional Soviet mythos. Solutions related to atomic energy or Orwellion population control are great.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

Pitch me ideas for how the USSR could of avoided it's collapse and continued to exist in the present.
.

I have heard the claim made that Stalin was so depressed when Hitler invaded that he almost committed suicide. So you get rid of Stalin in 1941 and that's a significant divergence point and it's as simple as _somebody_ mixing some barbiturates in his vodka.

The effect of replacing Stalin at the beginning of the Great Patriotic war? Probably nothing negative and I'd guess you end up with a junta of Generals in charge after it's over. Probably with Zhukov as front man.

Effects after the war? The USSR is still militaristic and authoritarian just more stable. Particularly so if Stalin is used to take the blame for getting the Motherland into the war. The place could be effectively de-Stalinized many years earlier. There might even be some economic reforms put into palce.

Much of post-War history could happen unchanged and the USSR would still be grim and unpleasant place. Just with at least some less crazy Party infighting.

[Shostak]

The Soviets invent the A-bomb first and use it. A lot.

[Johnny1A.2]

Stalin dies or is removed somehow several years before World War II. The new ruler may not be a nice guy, but he refrains from purging the officer corps so intensely, and this lets the Red Army operate somewhat more effectively.

If the USSR had done better in the Russo-Polish war, it might have made a big different to the subsequent events of World War II (or the war that would have occurred on that time line, anyway).

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

2.) Superscience! and Magical solutions are valid, but should be kept to a One Big Lie, or a couple of closely related applied phenomenon. A crystal ball that reveals the future on one end, to the contents of a single crashed
UFO on the other.
3.) Bonus points will be given to any solution that's firmly grounded in the fictional Soviet mythos. Solutions related to atomic energy or Orwellion population control are great.

There was reportedly a time when the Soviets fielded a new run of submarines that scared American defense personnel badly. They performed so well that for a while there was a fear that the Soviets had made some kind of a physics breakthrough.

After a time, it was learned that the truth was simpler, and nastier. They had left a big chunk of the shielding off the nuclear reactor. It wasn't enough to be immediately lethal, but it was bad enough to be a long term health problem for the crews. But it saved enough weight to improve performance substantially, or so the story goes. They could make speeds as much as 50% better than would have been possible with proper shielding.

Suppose the fear had been justified, and the Soviets had made some kind of breakthrough that let them improve the performance of their subs (and maybe other stuff) sometime in the 1960s. By itself it wouldn't necessarily save the USSR, but it would have helped, depending on exactly what the breakthrough was.

[Johnny1A.2]

The Jerry Pournelle Option: the USA and USSR actually form an alliance sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, and more or less divide up the planet. That was the backstory of the 'Empire of Man' stories by Pournelle, and the famous SF work The Mote In God's Eye. The alliance removes competition and lets the USSR leverage its system of tributary states on a larger scale and for longer.

(In the real world, there was an old joke in eastern Europe to the effect that: The Russians have crossed a cow and a giraffe. The offspring is a marvelous beast that feeds in Poland (or wherever) and is milked in Moscow.)

I used to assume that this idea was simply fiction, but I once heard a former Ford Administration official comment in an interview that the Soviets had indeed hinted at such an arrangement for a time in the early 1970s.

[TGLS]

It turns out Lysenko was right, and righter than anyone could ever believe. Lysenko actually brings about the agricultural breakthroughs he claimed, and his successors apply his theories to animals and people. The culmination of all this is New Soviet Man project, creating carefully specialized castes to manage the new Soviet era (supersoldiers, compliant workers, etc.) Treat this as TL6+3 biotechnology.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by TGLS

It turns out Lysenko was right, and righter than anyone could ever believe. Lysenko actually brings about the agricultural breakthroughs he claimed, and his successors apply his theories to animals and people. The culmination of all this is New Soviet Man project, creating carefully specialized castes to manage the new Soviet era (supersoldiers, compliant workers, etc.) Treat this as TL6+3 biotechnology.

For a subtler, and scarier SFnal possibility: there were always rumors of psychic research projects (on both sides) that circulated during the Cold War.

Assume that sometime in, say, the late 60s, the Soviets actually managed to perfect a reliable remote-viewing technique that let them spy on American (or other) assets without spies in place, or maybe only having to get the esper within a few miles or something. But they could put their psychic agent in a motel room in Washington D.C. and 'watch and listen' to anything going on in the Pentagon or the White House or Langley.

Subtle, scary, and obvious applications to domestic enforcement as well, the KGB internal directorates would have gone to town with that technology.

That might just have been enough to keep the USSR in business to 2018.

[PTTG]

A Imperial biowarfare project was created that targeted corn. Specifically, it was a fungus that parasitized corn and loaded the ground with a complex of herbicides. The corn plants themselves were merely weakened, but any crops nearby would sicken and die over the growing season, and the soil itself gradually went sour over over the years.

The result is famine in the USA and much of the west. The persistent crop failures made the US unable to capitalize on its post-war strengths, and gave the USSR a freer hand. Combine that with Lysenko getting butterflied away, and the USSR eventually becomes the breadbasket of Europe, and can extract significant concessions in exchange for cooperation.

[Luke Bunyip]

• Stalin dies early on (critical failure on a health roll after too much compulsive carousing). Beria manages to take control. He then reinstitutes private property, and cuts a deal with the West.
  
  
• Less targeting of Russian Jews. Aiding the Zionists becomes a part of Soviet policy.
  
  
• Possibly more or different intervention in the Spanish Civil War.
  
  
• Soviet Union institutes a series of economic reforms, which are akin to the approach used by the Chinese Communists during the late 20th Century. These lead to a better standard of living, and a more robust and diversified economy.
  
  
• The above could lead to potential conflict between the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Chinese Civil War may not end in 1949 with the Nationalists retreating to Taiwan and Shan State in Burma.
  
  
• Western physicists flee Nazism by going East, not West. Soviets get an early kickstart in developing nuclear weaponry and energy.
  
  
• Trotsky gets up to all sorts of mischief. Given his "world revolution" approach (contrast with Stalin's "socialism in one nation") he may attempt to facilitate a shift to the left in some countries, orchestrate a couple of coups, civil wars in both Europe and the New World. Trotskyist are gonna white-ant, Stalin or no Stalin. Also, Trotskyist terrorists could let off a bomb in a major city, sabotage a nuclear power plant...

[Tyneras]

The USSR successfully starts a second civil war in the USA by hijacking the civil rights movement. The USA ultimately survives, but becomes an isolated, genocidal racist one party state and the USSR is unopposed for the decades the USA is consumed by internal turmoil.