If Gorbachev remains in control of the USSR throughout the 90s NATO won't expand further eastward and it would try to help Yugoslavia to survive as long as it can. So what if that never happened? Would they invade France first, or invade Russia first? Rulers died and were replaced by upper members of the communist party who may have had different ideas of the future but still kept the union shrouded in secrecy. How would Nazi Germany's war plans have changed? If Gorbachev remains in control of the USSR throughout the 90s NATO won't expand further eastward and it would try to help Yugoslavia to survive as long as it can. We're here to explore alternate history scenarios in interesting ways. Press J to jump to the feed. Author Mark Millar created the comic with the premise "What if Superman had been raised in the Soviet Union? According to a 2014 poll, 57 percent of citizens of Russia regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, while 30 percent said they did not. VKP would just participate in the elections like a normal party, Press J to jump to the feed. In the end, the tension between the newly empowered citizenry and a Soviet state with ruined credibility proved too much to overcome, and a last gasp coup attempt by Communist hardliners shattered the Soviet Union. In summer 1945, USSR decided to declare war on Japan. Thus, when Stalinist terror ended in the 1950s and was replaced by the less oppressive (relatively speaking) hand of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev eras, the real growth ground to a halt, and the Gorbachev era reforms came too late to prevent collapse. What if Russia had remained in World War 1/Say Lenin never returned to Russia? Nitpick, the USSR fell in 1991, not 1992. The lengths the Central Committee went to keep secrets was insane, even trying to cover up the world’s worst nuclear disaster from western powers and thos… A 2018 Levada Center poll showed that 66% of Russians lamented the fall of the Soviet Union. Once Gorbachev resigns in the late 90s and Putin took over in 99 like in OTL, the USSR would be like Putin's Russia but larger and less democratic. By 1987, Uriah Heep were back in business with a revitalised line-up and they were ready to be embraced by a country that had never seen them live ever before. The USSR died decades ago. *I know that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was a major driving cause of instability in the Middle East, but how might the absence of the Soviet Union impacted it, if at all? An impersonator of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin walks past a hammer-and-sickle red flag in Moscow on Nov. 21. The existence of the monstrosity named the Soviet Union, in my opinion, is arguably the most definitive aspect of the 20th century. When Iraq invaded Kuwait the price of oil went way up. Collapse of the Soviet Union, sequence of events that led to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. on December 31, 1991. How would that change the length and magnitude of the Second World War? Also, without Lenin, Bolshevik/Menshevik split wouldnt probably happen and the coup wouldn't happen too. Would that alter his goals and decisions to invade Poland and Russia? Welcome to HistoryWhatIf! You know what it is. 2.) So if by some miracle the USSR did survive, they are likely a market driven economy with little or no central planning or government ownership of industry. **Maybe I'm placing way too much weight on Lenin, but I'm no expert by any means so I'm curious. It was political weakness at the top of the Soviet Union that allowed the system to collapse. He inherited a broken, stagnant, and corrupt system in 1985. Elderly people tended to be more nostalgic than younger Russians. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was little information about what was happening inside of the empire. The first socialist state – and empire, and then superpower – did not die innocent or, actually, without achievements. Also, these questions may be downplaying how upset and angry the Russian people were at that time, but it's interesting to wonder what would have changed if Russia stayed in World War 1 all the way through to the end. But due to limitations on time he was never fully able to state out his views to the class -_-" I would humbly like to ask this community the same question, and am very interested in your view/opinions on what might have been. How different would the world be today?" Apartheid's end was partially accomplished because anti-Soviet Westerners (by no means all of The West) weren't as worried about the black and colored population bringing South Africa into the Soviet camp. The U.S. did not need to invade Russia or drop bombs on Saint Petersburg to end the threat of the Red Menace. "It received critical acclaim and was nominated for the 2004 Eisner Award for best limited series. But what would the world look like if for whatever reason the Soviet Union reunited today? Never say never of course. The dissolution of the U.S.S.R. was caused by … Fall of the Soviet Union. The Deng Xiaoping example is a valid one, but liberalization amounted to admission that central planning absolutely didn't deliver the desired result, and thus people like Brezhnev (in power from 1964-1982) would rather stagnate in the Soviet way than reform in the western way. 3.) In the 1980's the Soviets sent troops into Afghanistan. South Vietnam, and Laos both fell to communism in the mid 70's. If Lenin was absolutely necessary for the eventual seizure of the Russian government (and assuming he didn't return to Russia here), and communism never was instituted and the USSR never formed, would Hitler's hatred for Slavs and groups in Eastern Europe have been significantly less? Superman: Red Son is a three-issue prestige format comic book mini-series published by DC Comics that was released under their Elseworlds imprint in 2003. I did once ask my history professor "What if the USSR never did 'fell' in 1989? If Lenin never returned, would the Bolsheviks have had enough strength, leadership, and/or willingness to seize control of the Russian provincial government? Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; U.S.S.R.), former northern Eurasian empire (1917/22–1991) stretching from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean and, in its final years, consisting of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. As states go, the Soviet Union died young. During the 2000s, it's still possible to see Putin to rise up and become the head of the USSR. I've seen a few posts similar to this before, but I have some questions I could not find and the posts I found are years old, so maybe some people here have some new ideas (or we know more now/think differently?). Such a case would mean … What if the Soviet Union never fell? (I'm thinking about the Soviet-Afghan War here, and how that being different could have potentially influenced/prevented the US war in Afghanistan.) The Soviet Union officially fell on December, 26 1991 when the USSR was dissolved and the communist-era policies of the region ceased. Cookies help us deliver our Services. If someone other than Gorby was there, a hardliner, they might have prevented the US from doing Desert Storm. Would Russia have remained in WW1 even if Lenin never returned, or would the Russians still be so sick of their conditions that they would have eventually pulled out anyway? The reforms implemented by President Mikhail Gorbachev and the backlash against them hastened the demise of the Soviet state. It changed everything. - 912142 The world will obviously tear to shreds if america threw bombs. Well without the Soviet Union falling, Al Queda and its ilk would of been buggin the Soviets more then the US since we would of never started to play in the Middle East. 4.) As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1990, these Russian speakers were faced with losing their status within an independent Moldova - or a Moldova united with Romania. If it did, I think the USSR would recover and rise economically like China, but the rest of the Soviet Empire would still fall. The capital was … But if Americans hadn’t dropped the nukes, USA and USSR would start an operation, to finish Japan. By using our Services or clicking I agree, you agree to our use of cookies. I just ran into a conspiracy theory about communism that actually justifies a remake of Red Dawn. For that to happen, I think Mikhail Gorbachev would have to be the Soviet version of Deng Xiaoping. This proves that there was a sort of domino effect happening. It was simply a comment in an article about North Korea claiming they’ll be launching a nuclear missile tomorrow (yawn). Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. It also never made it to where it really wanted to be: communism. South Korea was already a democracy by the time the Berlin Wall fell down, as was much of Latin America. (I'm thinking about Poland and other countries becoming their own independent nations as a result of the Treaty of Versailles & the Polish-Soviet War between WW1 and WW2.). Comments from WordPress. Would the White Army have beaten the Red Army (if the Red Army could even be raised, or was so in smaller numbers)? - Basically, if Russia remained in the war, how would that change the course of the early days of WW2? The nuclear factor Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States teetered on the edge of mutual nuclear destruction. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. From its formation in 1922 to its collapse in 1991, any political or economic decision made in almost any country would have directly or indirectly involved the USA and the Soviet Union, the 2 superpowers at that time. … Provisional government was so weak it was literally couped with a single ship, so it probably could still happen without Lenin. The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a federal socialist state in Northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast, More posts from the HistoryWhatIf community. Their music became tremendously popular in the Soviet Union even as the band fell on difficult times in the early 1980s. To prevent this, their economy would have needed to liberalize long before Gorbachev even took office. The Soviet Communist government would have never allowed its republics to freely leave the country as independent entities. The result is a nation that does not significantly resemble the 1980s USSR and may have even allowed the non-Russian republics to exit peacefully. Some of their own component republics didn't feel any need to remain either, and places like Estonia (forcibly annexed in 1940) were practically in open revolt. Either way, the cracks had already showed in 1989-90 with most of the Warsaw Pact simultaneously removing themselves and the USSR left unable to stop them. In this alternate scenario, the Soviet Union survived until the 21st century maintaining it's Communist government and using the 1977 constitution. 5.) According to the Central Intelligence Agency, an average Soviet citizen consumes 3,280 calories a day, compared to 3,520 calories for the American. Would there be any changes to the Middle East during the second half of the 20th century/today? I reply to a commenter here - who gathered some comments made previously in Reddit - regarding the validity of the time series used here. With the Soviet Union remaining neutral (and continuing to ship resources to Germany under the Nazi–Soviet Pact,) Germany would have been … Say Poland remained Russian territory after WW1 (if the Russians remained in the war and had not conceded territory to the Germans before the overall official end to the war). The fall of the Soviet Union is a case study in waiting for the laws of economics to destroy a nation. Supposedly the USSR did not collapse like in our timeline like it managed to fixed it's internal problems and was able to recover it's economy. If the Afghan's never pushed Russia out of their country, and the Soviet Union never fell to an economic collapse, how many more countries would have had Soviet supported civil wars, and revolutions? They weren’t able to do much, as in 2nd September 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered and the war ended. What might the effects be on World War 2/Soviet Union/Middle East today? Would there still be a crisis in the Ukraine today if the Soviet Union have never collapsed? Feel free to answer any of these questions (they’re in order of my own curiosity), or comment about anything you think should or could be mentioned: 1.) The fall of the Soviet Union was a decades-in-the-making outcome of Cold War politics, but it happened quite suddenly in the late 80s and early 90s, primarily at the level of … Learn more about one of the key events of the 20th century in … Because it might revenge on USA. If it did, I think the USSR would recover and rise economically like China, but the rest of the Soviet Empire would still fall. Russia will mark the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union… They didn’t want that. A broken, stagnant, and then superpower – did not need to invade Poland and?., so it probably could still happen without Lenin, Bolshevik/Menshevik split wouldnt probably happen and the War, Soviet. 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