Revolutions of 1989 Scenario

[seventeethdecember2016]

Brezhnev never died and Gorbachev never came to power. Besides this, and policies adopted after Brezhnev, everything went concurrent to history as we know it.

How do you think Brezhnev would have handled the falling of the Berlin Wall, round table talks in Warsaw, the Velvet Revolution, and the Baltic Way marches?
At least in respects to the Brezhnev Doctrine.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

Those things simply wouldn't have happened under Brezhnev, since Gorbachev's domestic and foreign policies were the trigger.

Brezhnev's policies were aimed at preserving the USSR under its ruling bureaucracy, which for the most part had already lost interest in communism and simply clung to the label as a way of claiming the right to lead a one-party state.

In Gorbachev's time, the bureaucracy got fed up with pretending to be communist and decided to stop putting up appearances completely. In order to convince the people to go along, they began with limited political reform when Gorbachev came to power in 1985 when promises to rebuild the country as a fully democratic but Leninist society were announced.

The bureaucracy still completely controlled virtually the entire press and the entire mass media, which remained state-run and even party-run. But it announced that "dissenting" views would be now be aired everywhere in the name of freedom and glasnost. Communists critical of the bureaucracy's reforms were often barred from the press as reactionary "enemies of perestroika", but this enabled lifelong functionaries of the Communist Party like Yeltsin to reinvent themselves as champions of the "true democracy" and the "market prosperity" that was sure to come. (In Western propaganda, this was depicted this as the birth of a genuine democracy.)

Soon the Soviet people were told that there still was no economic improvement despite the perestroika economy was doing no better because the reforms did not go far enough, and that only radical "shock therapy" capitalism would take care of their problems by producing economic miracles, American-style. This would mean the abolition of things like guaranteed employment, but who cares? The vanguard of the elite pushed the idea that only lazy people don't do well in America, and everyone who really wants to have a job gets one under capitalism.

The ruling nomenklatura of bureaucrats thus engineered the dismantling of the entire Soviet system, revoking social rights like free higher education and the right to work in exchange for the right to own the means of production they controlled. Since restoration of capitalism meant no more Cold War, it became expedient to reconcile with the West and abolish the Warsaw Pact, letting the unpopular regimes in Eastern Europe fall to the dissidents who made the same promises to their people that the newly-capitalist bureaucracy made in the Soviet Union.

The events you mention all took place in 1989, after years and years of Gorbachev's restructuring, and it was already perfectly clear that he had no intention of being another Brezhnev.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Although I respect your enthusiasm on the topic of Gorbachev, you derailed from the original question.

I realize that Gorbachev's policies were the catalysts behind all of these upheavals, but I explicitly asked users to ignore that point and share how they think Brezhnev would have handled such things. Also, I guess Prague Spring was also influenced by Gorbachev's policies.:laugh:

[Psy]

Odds are less that the Berlin Wall would have fallen, USSR troops would have taken to the street of East Berlin long before it reached that point and it would have gone down more like Tiananmen Square.

[Raúl Duke]

Well, for starters, he probably wouldn't have had the reforms come along.

How he would respond to the Berlin Wall, IDK. I have a feeling that Brezhnev wanted to keep things "running a steady course" so he would have taken some action to maintain the status quo, not sure if successful. I'm skeptical if they would've taken harsh action freely, but would maybe be ok with it if it's their only option. However, we have take into account that perhaps there was material conditions at work within the USSR in 1989; Brezhnev may have faced a revolt within the party between him and the "reform" minded.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

Although I respect your enthusiasm on the topic of Gorbachev, you derailed from the original question.

I kind of did, but that's because Brezhnev was the complete opposite of Gorbachev.


I realize that Gorbachev's policies were the catalysts behind all of these upheavals, but I explicitly asked users to ignore that point and share how they think Brezhnev would have handled such things. Also, I guess Prague Spring was also influenced by Gorbachev's policies.:laugh:

But Prague Spring was a very popular attempt at reforming by the Czechoslovak Communists, and not a revolt motivated by a popular anti-socialism or hatred of the Soviet Bloc; Dubcek even insisted that the country would remain inside the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact alliance. Hungary in 1956 was the last time something resembling a revolution occurred before Gorbachev. It's rather interesting that Hungary's uprising was also inspired by another variety of reformism -- namely, the liberalization of the Khrushchev period. But that was also less anti-socialist than anti-Soviet.

You could say that Brezhnev would have dealt with x the way he did with Prague Spring or the way Khrushchev dealt with the unrest in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, but the world would have been a very different place for such events as the round table talks in Warsaw and other evens of the Gorbachev era to have been possible without Gorbachev, since nothing in history happens the way it does outside of the causal context determining it.

[m1omfg]

I kind of did, but that's because Brezhnev was the complete opposite of Gorbachev.



But Prague Spring was a very popular attempt at reforming by the Czechoslovak Communists, and not a revolt motivated by a popular anti-socialism or hatred of the Soviet Bloc; Dubcek even insisted that the country would remain inside the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact alliance. Hungary in 1956 was the last time something resembling a revolution occurred before Gorbachev. It's rather interesting that Hungary's uprising was also inspired by another variety of reformism -- namely, the liberalization of the Khrushchev period. But that was also less anti-socialist than anti-Soviet.

You could say that Brezhnev would have dealt with x the way he did with Prague Spring or the way Khrushchev dealt with the unrest in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, but the world would have been a very different place for such events as the round table talks in Warsaw and other evens of the Gorbachev era to have been possible without Gorbachev, since nothing in history happens the way it does outside of the causal context determining it.

I am glad that somebody finally realized Prague Spring was no rebellion, it was the "commies" who started the change, and it was basically Titoism, except without the "non aligned stuff". Dubcek solved the shortages of some goods, stopped censorship and generally did good for the people. He was not a Gorbachev, he was a firm Soviet ally, he just didn't want to continue the horribly inefficient economic model of the early 1960s. Stalinism was good enough for the country in the immediate post-WW2 era when things were rebuilt and civil life recovered, but not for a recovered country with a modern society.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

I am glad that somebody finally realized Prague Spring was no rebellion. . .

Dubcek came back as the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Slovakia in the 1990s, so Czechoslovakia could certainly have gone down the Gorbachev path after some time had Brezhnev not forced him down in 1968. But there was no actual "rebellion" in 1968 -- I thought everybody realized this.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It doesn't matter who was at the top. These events were coming for a long time. There was stagnation and decline under Brezhnev, and real decline in the 1980s. Sure, Gorbachev was a trigger but let's not substitute 'great' men in here; the main cause of the USSRs collapse was the internal contradictions of the state capitalist system, which was gradually weakened and exposed for what it was by the ever increasing levels of cold war military spending and the abject failure to spread revolution and the eventual real abandonment of anything resembling Socialism as a policy goal.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

It doesn't matter who was at the top. These events were coming for a long time. There was stagnation and decline under Brezhnev, and real decline in the 1980s. Sure, Gorbachev was a trigger but let's not substitute 'great' men in here; the main cause of the USSRs collapse was the internal contradictions of the state capitalist system, which was gradually weakened and exposed for what it was by the ever increasing levels of cold war military spending and the abject failure to spread revolution and the eventual real abandonment of anything resembling Socialism as a policy goal.

But that's not what I've been saying here. There isn't any "great man theory of history" involved at all. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were only the representatives of the ruling Soviet bureaucracy and acted on its behalf.

As Marx once very famously said, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." But this obviously doesn't mean that every last detail of history is completely determined independent of contingency. Had Stalin lived until 1960, there would have been no de-Stalinization in 1956!

So, had Brezhnev lived into the late 1980s and proved an obstacle to the capitalist reforms, the bureaucracy could have "resigned" him in the same way it retired Khrushchev in 1964. Or the collapse of the Soviet system could have taken place a little later -- say, in the mid-1990s or late 1990s.

[m1omfg]

Dubcek came back as the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Slovakia in the 1990s, so Czechoslovakia could certainly have gone down the Gorbachev path after some time had Brezhnev not forced him down in 1968. But there was no actual "rebellion" in 1968 -- I thought everybody realized this.

He did but his policies were different from Gorbachev. His rule saw increase in available goods and relaxation in censorship, while people under Gorby starved and Leninists were surpressed just as much as anti-Leninists before. Despite what people say here, Dubcek was far less liberal than even Tito. He became a socdem but only after he saw his nation surpressed by Brezhnevite tanks.