What if Nikita Khrushchev never became the leader of the Soviet Union?
- Thread starter Shroob12
- Start date
No, By nearly every metric, living in Khrushchev's Soviet Union was the best time to actually live in the USSR.
Depends on who takes his place. Khrushchev was quite erratic AFAIK, and the Virgin Lands Campaign was an unmitigated disaster.
Molotov was too old at that point to be anything but a power broker.
Beria doesn't have the support.
Malenkov is probably the most likely candidate.
Depends POD and who would take power after Stalin.
Molotov I see bit unlikely.
Malenkov would be most plausible and almost managed to get leadership.
Beria has zero chances to get power. Him hadn't real support and was pretty hated.
Someone has to replace Khrushchev as an Ukrainian leader (1938-1949), most probably Postyshev. And then someone has to replace purged Kuznetsov (instead of Khrushchev) as a Secretary of the Central Committee in 1949 - maybe Postyshev, or maybe one of Stalin's new proteges - Brezhnev or Patolichev.
The USSR would likely be in a much better position in the Cold War. No Khrushchev means no Secret Speech, and the embarrassment that caused to the world communist movement. It likely means no Hungarian Revolution and no Sino-Soviet split. I doubt any alternative leader would be so reckless as to place nuclear weapons in Cuba. Internally, the USSR would avoid "hare-brained" schemes like the Virgin Lands Campaign.
As people have said, it depends who. I recall one of the shows I had been watching a lot on YouTube in the past month mentioned Malenkov might have been going the same route as Khrushchev did after him, though Malenkov was not EXACTLY the leader anyways. Still, whoever is in charge rather than Krushchev will hopefully have been working on the ground floor of Communist society here, or at least been outside of Moscow. Perhaps easy after so many purges dealt with so many older or self-made men among the political system. WWII is over and a lot of the same problems apply here for anyone who takes over.
You need loads more housing, you need to repair infrastructure, bring in more food, consumer goods, etc. After such a brutal war things need to be repaired and people need to be able to enjoy themselves a bit. I suppose propaganda will also be important here. Do the Soviets feel they won the war and that they just need to wait for the people in Western Europe to use electoins or uprisings to push the fascists out of the war, or are they going to be told they are still in a war footing? Might be a mix like what happened IOTL.
You need loads more housing, you need to repair infrastructure, bring in more food, consumer goods, etc. After such a brutal war things need to be repaired and people need to be able to enjoy themselves a bit. I suppose propaganda will also be important here. Do the Soviets feel they won the war and that they just need to wait for the people in Western Europe to use electoins or uprisings to push the fascists out of the war, or are they going to be told they are still in a war footing? Might be a mix like what happened IOTL.
And without Khruschev you probably avoid Brezhnev's stagnatised politics and USSR could develope its economy. But this depends of course who then instead Khruschev.
Though this implies that the Soviet system would be efficient. We need to keep in mind how the Soviets mostly traded with goods nternatoinally, as Soviets were not allowed foreign currency, and I believe foreigner firms were not allowed rubles. The official exchange rate the Soviets set was also widely different than on the Soviet black market. And oddly enough, these days people in Russia are nostalgic for Brezhnev, seeing it as one of the more propersous and stable times in the past century.
Really, the big problem is that for economic reform you may need to give more independence to some companies, and if those companies then continue to get free or subsidies raw goods from other sectors of society, they can then just sell the goods they make to other countries at higher prices. It is supposedly what happened under Gorbachev, when they were not careful and said companies could use spare goods for themselves, and did not have a method of enforcing that they provided a certain amount of products to the domestic market. And of course having thosequotas earlier on led to shoddy goods because the supply chain meant that the factories had to rush at full speed during the last week of a month, once they finally got the raw goods they needed to produce items. Gotta book from a reporter who was in Moscow during the Cold War who said people would check the production dates to avoid getting anything produced past the 20th.
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I would think Malenkov would be a better Premier than Khruschev. Malenkov was sort of a techochrat, he wanted the most qualified to lead the departments and such. He could get rid of some of the chronic nepotism and corruption in the USSR.
On the other hand Malenkov was an even bigger supporter of Lysenkoism than Khruschev (he helped edit Lysenko's original paper, in order to get Stalin interested in it) , so agriculture probably does worse.
On the other other hand, Malenkov would reorganise the Space Program a lot better, making it a single department instead of it having to go through the Department of Shipbuilding, the Department of Heavy Industry etc. Not only because of his technocratic beliefs, but also because he was personally involved in the Space Program and he would have wanted it to succeede.
And Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks etc. And Crimea would be part of Russia not Ukraine.
And wondering what would happen to Karelo-Finnish SSR. Would it be abolished like in OTL or would it continue its existence. Altough former seems more likely than latter.
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Briefly: Bullshit science what is not supported by Western science.